Resumen de Optimal load shedding by a new binary PSO

Ahmad Ahmadi, Yousef Alinejad Beromi, Hassan Rezai Soleymanpour

• Purpose – The voltage stability is a basic principle in the power system operation. Different short circuits, load growth, generation shortage, and other faults which disturb the voltage stability are serious threats to the system security. The voltage instability causes dispersal of a power system into sub-systems, and leads to blackout as well as heavy damages of the system equipments. Optimum load shedding during contingency situations is one of the most important issues in power system security analysis. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

  Design/methodology/approach – In this paper, a new binary particle swarm optimization technique (NB-PSO) is proposed for solving the integer-valued modeling of under-voltage load shedding problem. The updating mechanisms for the position and velocity of binary particles are amended in the proposed NB-PSO by using a new velocity definition, which has an excellent efficiency for solving complex binary optimization problems.

  Findings – The effectiveness and capability of the proposed NB-PSO optimization algorithm were illustrated according to the simulation results of applying it to the IEEE 118-bus test system. In addition, the performance of the proposed NB-PSO-based method was compared with other optimization algorithms, such as the binary particle swarm optimization (BPSO) and hybrid discrete particle swarm optimization (HDPSO) techniques. It was perceived that the NB-PSO performs superior than the BPSO and HDPSO for determining the best location and the minimum level of load shedding in order to prevent voltage instability.

  Originality/value – The proposed NB-PSO has novel modifications and techniques to enhance both exploration and exploitation capabilities to find the optimal feasible solution. The simulation results confirmed the effectiveness of the proposed method in determining the best location and the minimum amount of load shedding for voltage collapse prevention.