Optimal Power Flow Using Particle Swarm Optimization

The Optimal Power Flow (OPF) is an important criterion in today’s power system operation and control due to scarcity of energy resources, increasing power generation cost and ever growing demand for electric energy. As the size of the power system increases, load may be varying. The generators should share the total demand plus losses among themselves. The sharing should be based on the fuel cost of the total generation with respect to some security constraints. Conventional optimization methods that make use of derivatives and gradients are, in general, not able to locate or identify the global optimum. Heuristic algorithms such as genetic algorithms (GA) and evolutionary programming have been recently proposed for solving the OPF problem. Unfortunately, recent research has identified some deficiencies in GA performance. Recently, a new evolutionary computation technique, called Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO), has been proposed and introduced. This technique combines social psychology principles in socio-cognition human agents and evolutionary computations. In this paper, a novel PSO based approach is presented to solve Optimal Power Flow problem.