An Efficient Hybrid Method for Solving Security-Constrained Optimal Power Flow Problem

The optimal operation for different states such as normal and contingency cases of a power system has a very important role in the operation. Therefore, it is necessary to analyze contingencies in the system so as the most severe cases should be considered for integrating into the optimal power flow (OPF) problem and the security-constrained optimal power flow (SCOPF) becomes an important problem for considering in the power system operation. This paper proposes a combined pseudo-gradient based particle swarm optimization with constriction factor (PGPSO) and the differential evolution (DE) method for solving the SCOPF problem. The PGPSO-DE method is a newly developed method for utilizing the advantages of the pseudogradient guided PSO method with a constriction factor and the DE method. The proposed PGPSO-DE has been tested on the IEEE 30 bus system for the normal case and the contingency case with two types of the objective function. The results yielded from the proposed method have been validated via comparing to those from the conventional PSO, DE, and other methods reported in the literature. The comparisons for the results obtained from the proposed PGPSODE method have shown that it is very effective to solve the large-scale and complex SCOPF problem.