A two level approach to reactive planning in power systems

A two level optimization program is presented to solve the problem of reactive source expansion in system planning. The overall problem is decomposed into a non-linear subproblem and a mixed linear integer subproblem. The nonlinear subproblem is similar to the classic optimal power flow problem in power systems, the mixed linear integer problem is of fixed charge type and is solved by a branch and bound technique. The two sub-problems are coupled together by a set of linear inequalities. The two level algorithm has been applied to the IEEE 118 bus system for reactive planning.