Differential Evolution Approach for Optimal Power Flow Solution

This paper presents an algorithm for solving optimal power flow problem through the application of Differential Evolution (DE). The objective is to minimize the total fuel cost of thermal generating units having quadratic cost characteristics subjected to limits on generator real and reactive power outputs, bus voltages, transformer taps and power flow of transmission lines. The proposed method has been tested under simulated conditions on IEEE 30-bus system .The optimal power flow results obtained using DE are compared with other evolutionary methods. It is shown that DE total generation fuel cost is less expensive than those of evolutionary programming, tabu search, hybrid tabu search, and simulated annealing.