Comparative study of evolutionary computation methods for active-reactive power dispatch

This study presents a comparative study for four evolutionary computation (EC) methods to the optimal active-reactive power dispatch (ARPD) problem. Theoretically, there is a coupling relation between ARPDs. However, because of high X/R ratio existing in the transmission line, the problem of ARPD can be decomposed into two individual sub-problems by the decoupling concept, that is, ARPD problems. In this study, the evolutionary programming (EP), particle swarm optimisation (PSO), differential evolution (DE) and the proposed hybrid differential evolution (HDE) algorithms are used to separately solve the ARPD problem. To evaluate the performance of each method, the IEEE 30-bus and Taiwan Power Company (TPC) 345-kV simplified systems are employed as the study cases. The results indicate that the proposed HDE can obtain better results than the other methods in terms of active power transmission losses, voltage deviation, operating cost and convergence performance.