A Bacterial Foraging Based Multi-Objective Reactive Power Planning

Steady-state voltage stability can certainly be enhanced by FACTS (Flexible AC Transmission Systems) devices. Bacterial foraging algorithm based approach for finding the optimum rating of Static VAR Compensator (SVC) is presented in this paper. The reactive power supplied by SVC is the control variable and is randomly distributed in bacterial foraging algorithm for optimization problem. The proposed approach has been evaluated with three different objective functions namely, voltage stability enhancement, real power loss minimization and total cost minimization. Voltage stability level of the system is defined based on the L-index of load buses. The proposed algorithm is tested on IEEE 14 bus system using MATLAB Software Version 7.0 in Pentium IV computer.