A hybrid PSO technique for procuring VAR ancillary service in the deregulated electricity markets

This paper develops a new market-based technique for acquiring VAR ancillary service in the electricity market. The main objective of the developed market is to enable transmission operator "TO" to procure VAR service in a long term contract from the critical VAR providers that satisfy minimum VAR service payment while maintaining system security. Reactive power control problem for voltage stability is introduced into the VAR market problem in an explicit manner for normal and emergency states. An integration of particle swarm optimization "PSO" is presented with successive linear programming "SLP" for dealing with the VAR ancillary service problem. The problem is formulated as a large-scale nonlinear constrained optimization problem with a non-differentiable objective function representing VAR payment and operational costs. This type of problem is hard to be treated straightforwardly by the classical optimization methods. Therefore, we propose here a two-layer hybrid PSO/SLP approach, which is suited for carrying out the difficulties associated with non-differentiable and discontinuous objective functions. The proposed method has been examined on the standard IEEE 57 bus-system and compared with GA/SLP method to demonstrate its capability. (C) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.