Optimal Reactive Power Dispatch Using Improved Chaotic PSO Algorithm with the Wingbeat Frequency

Abstract The importance of reactive power to the economy and security of power systems cannot be overemphasized. For instance, Transmission losses increase when reactive power is unevenly distributed on transmission network; and power quality is affected as well. The cheapest way of reducing these transmission lines losses is via reactive power dispatch approach. This study therefore proposes an Improved Chaotic Particle Swarm Optimization algorithm (ICPSO) with the primary aim of reducing real power transmission line losses while adhering to system constraints. Although the traditional PSO has a fast convergence speed, it falls easily into local optimum and it is slow at the later stage of convergence. The ICPSO is proposed in this research to overcome these shortcomings. The approach combines PSO with chaotic map which increases particles’ diversity, allowing particles to explore the search region more; and a wingbeat frequency component which helps to sustain the rate of convergence of particles. MATPOWER 7.1 in MATLAB 2019a environment was utilized for the implementation. The purported algorithm was examined on IEEE14 and IEEE30 Test Beds respectively. When tried out on IEEE14 Test bed, real power loss was reduced from 13.393 MW to 12.260 MW; whereas real power transmission line loss was brought down from 17.557 MW to 15.977 MW when tried out on IEEE30 Test Bed. In terms of reducing real power transmission lines losses, the simulation results show that the proposed approach performs better when compared with other algorithms.