Reactive Power Optimization Through Evolutionary Techniques: A Comparative Study Of The Ga, De And Pso Algorithms

The reactive power planning and dispatch problems have been solved using Genetic algorithm (GA), Differential evolution (DE) and Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) technique in order to have a comparative study on the performance of these algorithms. It has been found that Differential evolution performs best followed by the Particle swarm optimization. Both DE and PSO can perform well even with very small population size whereas GA needs a reasonably large population size. Thus, the computational efforts needed by both DE and PSO are less than that of GA.