A PROPOSED VARIANT OF DIFFERENTIAL EVOLUTION FOR OPTIMAL POWER FLOW PROBLEM

Abstract

This paper presents a proposed variant of differential evolution approach (DEA) for solving the optimal power flow (OPF) problem. The OPF aims to minimize/maximize certain objective functions while maintaining different equality and inequality constraints. The fuel cost minimization, power losses minimization, and voltage stability improvement are considered as the OPF objective functions. The proposed approach employs a proposed variant of DEA (DE/best/1) for solving the OPF. The proposed approach has a high capability of global search exploitation and fast convergence. The effectiveness of the proposed DEA is tested on the standard IEEE 30-bus test system and the West Delta region system (WDN) as a part of the Egyptian Unified network. The obtained numerical results by the proposed DEA are compared with other evolutionary methods to show its potential and capability