Reactive power dispatch considering voltage stability with seeker optimization algorithm

Optimal reactive power dispatch (ORPD) has a growing impact on secure and economical operation of power systems. This issue is well known as a non-linear, multi-modal and multi-objective optimization problem where global optimization techniques are required in order to avoid local minima. In the last decades, computation intelligence-based techniques such as genetic algorithms (GAs), differential evolution (DE) algorithms and particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithms, etc., have often been used for this aim. In this work, a seeker optimization algorithm (SOA) based method is proposed for ORPD considering static voltage stability and voltage deviation. The SOA is based on the concept of simulating the act of human searching where search direction is based on the empirical gradient by evaluating the response to the position changes and step length is based on uncertainty reasoning by using a simple Fuzzy rule. The algorithm's performance is studied with comparisons of two versions of GAs, three versions of DE algorithms and four versions of PSO algorithms on the IEEE 57 and 118-bus power systems. The simulation results show that the proposed approach performed better than the other listed algorithms and can be efficiently used for the ORPD problem.