A Hybrid GWO-PSO technique for the solution of Reactive Power Planning Problem

Over the years the optimization in various areas of power system has immensely attracted the attention of power engineers and researchers. RPP problem is one of such areas. This is done by the placement of reactive power sources in the weak buses and thereafter minimizing the operating cost of the system which is directly dependent on the system transmission loss. The work proposed in this article utilizes FVSI method to detect the weak bus. GWO-PSO is proposed in the current work for providing optimal solution to RPP problem. To test the efficacy of the proposed technique, comparative analysis is then performed among the variants of PSO and hybrid GWO-PSO. The optimal solution rendered by the proposed method is compared with other heuristic algorithms. The proposed method of GWO-PSO generates a reduction of 4.25% in operating cost for IEEE 30 bus and 5.99% for New England 39 bus system. The comparison thus yields that the GWO-PSO hybrid method is superior in generating optimality, diversity and is efficient to generate solution strategies for RPP even in a practical power network.