A hybrid meta-heuristic method for optimal allocation of UPFCs

This paper proposes a hybrid meta-heuristic method for determining the optimal allocation of FACTS devices in power systems. The optimal allocation of FACTS may be expressed as a nonlinear mixed integer problem that has integer and continuous variables corresponding to the location variables and control ones, respectively. The proposed method makes use of a hybrid meta-heuristic method with two layers. Layer 1 determines the allocation with Tabu search (TS) while Layer 2 evaluates the control variables with evolutionary particle swarm optimization (EPSO). The proposed method is successfully applied to a sample system.