Iterative simulation optimization approach for optimal volt-ampere reactive sources planning

Abstract

This work proposes a two-phase iterative simulation optimization approach to solve the optimal volt-ampere reactive (VAR) sources planning problem. In the upper phase, an Ordinal Optimization (OO)-based method is employed as the optimization methodology, which performs ranking and selection to choose better solutions from a candidate solution set based on the structural information of system extracted from the simulation methodology performed in the lower phase. The simulation methodology, which is based on the Dual Projected Pseudo Quasi-Newton (DPPQN) method, is employed in the lower phase. The proposed OO-based approach consists of four levels. The size and solution quality of the resulting candidate solution set is reduced and improved level by level, and the best solution obtained in the final level is the good enough capacitor placement pattern that we seek. Via numerous tests, this work demonstrates the efficiency of the proposed approach with respect to the genetic algorithm (GA) and tabu search (TS) on the IEEE 118-bus system. Test results show that the proposed approach is an excellent alternative for the optimal VAR sources planning problems.