An Intelligent Water Drop Algorithm for Solving Optimal Reactive Power Dispatch Problem

Abstarct: This paper presents an algorithm for solving the multi-objective reactive power dispatch problem in a power system. Modal analysis of the system is used for static voltage stability assessment. Loss minimization and maximization of voltage stability margin are taken as the objectives. Generator terminal voltages, reactive power generation of the capacitor banks and tap changing transformer setting are taken as the optimization variables. In this paper an intelligent water drop (IWD) algorithm has been proposed to solve this combinatorial optimization problem. Intelligent water drop algorithm is a swarm-based nature inspired optimization algorithm, which has been inspired from natural rivers. A natural river often finds good paths among lots of possible paths in its ways from source to destination and finally find almost optimal path to their destination. These ideas are embedded into proposed algorithm for solving reactive dispatch problem.