A reactive power resource planning method by tabu search in competitive markets

A reactive power resource planning problem in a competitive market environment is generally formulated as a large scale mixed integer programming problem, and is mathematically hard to solve. In this paper, to solve the problem, an approach named “multi-stage tabu search” is proposed, where tabu search is used in two stages. One is used to determine the optimal installation of reactive power resources. The other is used to determine the optimal operation of the reactive power resources for several pre-determined operational states. To reduce the computational burden, the sensitivity analysis is used for selecting the efficient neighborhood solutions of the tabu search both for installing resources and for changing transformer taps. Numerical examples are shown to demonstrate the validity of the method