A Hybrid Differential Evolution and Harmony Search for Optimal Power Flow With FACTS Devices

This paper proposes a hybrid differential evolution (DE) and harmony search (HS) for solving optimal power flow (OPF) problem with FACTS devices including static Var compensator (SVC), thyristor-controlled series compensation (TCSA), and thyristor-controlled phase shifter (TCPS). The proposed hybrid DE-HS is to utilize the advantages of the DE and HS methods to enhance its search ability for dealing with large-scale and complex problems. The proposed method has been tested on the IEEE 30 bus system with the variety of objective functions including quadratic fuel cost, power loss, voltage deviation, and voltage stability index and the obtained results from the proposed hybrid DE-HS have been compared to those from other algorithms. The result comparison has indicated that the proposed hybrid DE-HS algorithm can obtain better solution quality than many other methods. Therefore, the proposed hybrid DE-HS method can be an efficient method for solving the OPF problem incorporating FACTS devices.