Optimal Power Flow Using Artificial Bee Colony with Incorporation of FACTS Devices: a Case Study

This paper presents solution of optimal power flow (OPF) problem of practical power system via an Artificial Bee Colony (ABC) algorithm. The objective is to minimize the total fuel cost of generation and environmental pollution caused by fossil based thermal generating units and also maintaining an acceptable system performance in terms of limits on generator reactive power outputs, bus voltages, Static VAR Compensator (SVC) parameters and overload in transmission lines. CPU times can be reduced by decomposing the problem in two subproblems, the first subproblem minimize the fuel cost of generation and environmental pollution and the second one is a reactive power dispatch so optimum bus voltages can be determined and reduce the losses by controlling tap changes of the transformers and the static Var Compensators (SVC). To verify the proposed approach and for comparison purposes, we perform simulations on IEEE 30-bus system with six generating units and on the Algerian network with 114 buses, 175 branches (lines and transformers) and 15 generators. The obtained results indicate that ABC is an easy to use, fast, robust and powerful optimization technique compared to the other global optimization method (PSO). Copyright (C) 2011 Praise Worthy Prize S.r.l. - All rights reserved.