Transmission System Loadability Enhancement Study by Ordinal Optimization Method

Due to the growth of electricity demands and transactions in power markets, existing power networks need to be enhanced in order to increase their loadability. The problem of determining the best locations for network reinforcement can be formulated as a mixed discrete-continuous nonlinear optimization problem (MDCP). The complexity of the problem makes extensive simulations necessary and the computational requirement is high. An ordinal optimization (OO) technique is proposed in this paper to solve the MDCP involving two types of flexible ac transmission systems (FACTS) devices, namely static var compensator (SVC) and thyristor controlled series compensator (TCSC), for system loadability enhancement. In this approach, crude models are proposed to cope with the complexity of the problem and speed up the simulations with high alignment confidence. Test results based on a practical power system confirm that the proposed models permit the use of OO-based approach for finding good enough solutions with less computational efforts.