International Journal of Engineering and Technology

This paper presents the applications of static and dynamic VAR sources for Transmission Power Loss (TPL) minimization using Imperialist Competitive Algorithm (ICA). Static VAR sources consists of switchable shunt capacitors whereas, the dynamic VAR sources are flexible AC transmission system (FACTS) devices. A novel approach of simultaneous optimal placement and sizing of static and dynamic VAR sources has been proposed which proves to be more efficient in TPL minimization when compared to their individual counter parts. Usage of static and dynamic VAR sources simultaneously makes the power system optimization problem more complex, which needs special optimization tool. Hence, a novel ICA optimization algorithm is also proposed in this paper to achieve a global optimization solution for the above mentioned complex problem. The proposed ICA is inspired by imperialistic competition in which all the countries are divided into two types: imperialist states and colonies. Imperialistic competition is the main part of proposed algorithm and hopefully causes the colonies to converge to the global minimum of the optimization problem. The proposed method is tested on the standard IEEE-14 bus and IEEE-118 bus test systems. Results obtained are compared against the individual usage of VAR sources and as well as with the other proven optimization algorithms such as Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) and Genetic Algorithm (GA). Results indicate that the proposed method obtains a better optimal solution when compared to that of the conventional approaches.