Hierarchical OO-PTS for voltage and reactive power control in distribution systems

This work proposes a method for voltage and reactive power control in distribution systems with a hybrid method of hierarchical optimization, parallel tabu search (PTS) and ordinal optimization (OO). Voltage and reactive power control is of main concern in distribution automation. To improve the performance of voltage and reactive power control, a hierarchical scheme is introduced into distribution systems. It allows to realize a accurate and efficient algorithm a hierarchical way. Each subsystem is optimized by a hybrid method of parallel tabu search (PTS) and ordinal optimization (OO). PTS has advantage over TS in terms of solution accuracy and computational time. OO is useful for selecting better solution candidates of the neighborhood in a probabilistic and systematic way. It plays an important role to select better solution candidates guaranteed by the probabilistic theory in the solution neighborhood of PTS. The proposed method is demonstrated in a sample system.