A NEW PARTICLE SWARM OPTIMIZATION ALGORITHM AND ITS APPLICATION TO LOAD FLOW

Abstract

A new variant of Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithm along with a novel approach of implementing reactive power constraints for PV buses has been presented in this thesis. The new PSO version, Selection Enabled PSO (SEPSO), “selects” particles with better objective function value and eliminates worse particles after a certain number of iterations. The computational efficiency of SEPSO over the conventional PSO is ratified by using it to minimize mathematical benchmark functions. The number of function evaluations up to convergence is significantly reduced in case of SEPSO. Henceforth, SEPSO is applied to perform load flow studies on IEEE 5 bus and IEEE 14 bus system. As expected, a considerable reduction in terms of function evaluations is observed when contrasted with the number of function evaluations required by conventional PSO to perform load flow on IEEE 5 bus and IEEE 14 bus system.