Performance characteristics of an OPF for allocation of VArs in a competitive environment

This paper presents a linear programming (LP) based direct reactive optimal power flow (OFF) to optimally allocate reactive power in a given instantaneous state of a system. The main focus of the paper is on accuracy and convergence rate of the developed OFF. The issue of performance characteristics arises from the inability of the LP based OPF to converge spontaneously. A bound reduction heuristics technique is developed to enforce the convergence of the OPF. Extensive case studies are carried out on the IEEE-118 bus system to illustrate the impact of different bound reduction parameters on the convergence rate and the accuracy of the solution.