Imperialist Competitive Algorithm for reactive power dispatch problem in electricity markets

The Imperialist Competitive Algorithm (ICA) has been recently introduced. This algorithm that is based on a socio-politically inspired optimization strategy has shown good convergence rate to achieve global optimum for different optimization problems. In a deregulated electricity market, reactive power suppliers as one of six ancillary services are eligible for financial compensation. In this paper, a reactive power market that is decoupled from the active power market has been solved using the ICA. Minimizing energy losses and total payments to reactive power providers by the system operator are considered as the objectives of the introduced reactive power market. The corresponding optimization problem is a non-convex Mixed-Integer Non-Linear Programming (MINLP) problem. Here, an algorithm is introduced that uses the ICA to change the MINLP problem to a series of NLP sub problems. The IEEE 30-bus test system is used to demonstrate some aspects of the application of the ICA on the reactive power market problem. The results are compared with those obtained by Genetic Algorithm (GA) showing that the ICA convergence rate is more than GA.