A Particle Swarm Optimization for Optimal Reactive Power

This paper presents particle swarm optimization (PSO) based approach for solving optimal reactive power dispatch for minimizing power losses. The control variables are bus voltage magnitudes (continuous type), transformer tap settings (discrete type) and reactive power generation of capacitor banks (discrete type). The algorithm solution of PSO is tested on a standard IEEE 30 Bus system. The intention is to minimize power losses by optimizing the reactive power dispatch with optimal setting of control variables without violating inequality constraints and satisfying equality constraint. The detailed results for different cases have been listed