New parallel tabu search for voltage and reactive power control in power systems

Abstract

This paper proposes a new method for voltage and reactive power control in power systems. The proposed method is based on tabu search that is effective for combinatorial problems. Tabu search makes use of the idea of the hill-climbing method, but some search directions are fixed to escape from local minima. To improve the solution accuracy, a parallel scheme for tabu search is developed so that the neighborhood is computed in a parallel way with different tabu lengths. In this paper, the proposed method is applied to voltage and reactive power control in power systems. The efficiency of the proposed method is demonstrated in a sample system.