Optimum Reactive Power Dispatch Solution using Hybrid Particle Swarm Optimization and Pathfinder Algorithm

Optimum reactive power dispatch (ORPD) significantly impacts the operation and control of electrical power systems (EPS) due to its undeniable benefit in the economic operation and reliability of the systems. ORPD is a sub-problem of optimal power flow (OPF). The main aim is to reduce/minimize the real power loss. Among the swarm intelligence (SI) metaheuristic algorithms is particle swarm optimization (PSO), which has fast convergence speed and gives the optimum solution to a particular problem by moving the swarm in the intensification (exploitation) search space. Also, the pathfinder algorithm (PFA) mimics the collective movement of the swarms with a leading member. Therefore, combining the fast convergence of PSO with PFA to form a hybrid technique is considered a viable approach in this study to avoid decreasing PFA searchability when the dimension of the problem increases. In this article, a hybrid algorithm based on a particle swarm optimization and pathfinder algorithm (HPSO-PFA) is proposed for the first time to study the combination of the control variables (generator voltage, transformer tap, and sizing of reactive compensation to obtain the objective function (total real power loss). The proposed method is tested on the IEEE 30 and 118 bus systems. The losses were reduced to 16.14262 MW and 107.2913 MW for the IEEE 30 and 118 test systems. Furthermore, the percentage (%) reduction for the IEEE 30 and 118 test systems are 9.8% and 19.25%, respectively. The result demonstrates the performance of HPSO-PFA gives a better solution than the other algorithms.