Quasi-oppositional differential evolution for optimal reactive power dispatch

•This paper presents QODE to solve RPD problem of a power system.•QODE has been used here to improve the effectiveness and quality of the solution.•QODE has been tested on IEEE 30-bus, 57-bus and 118-bus test systems.•It is found that QODE based approach is able to provide better solution.

This paper presents quasi-oppositional differential evolution to solve reactive power dispatch problem of a power system. Differential evolution (DE) is a population-based stochastic parallel search evolutionary algorithm. Quasi-oppositional differential evolution has been used here to improve the effectiveness and quality of the solution. The proposed quasi-oppositional differential evolution (QODE) employs quasi-oppositional based learning (QOBL) for population initialization and also for generation jumping. Reactive power dispatch is an optimization problem that reduces grid congestion with more than one objective. The proposed method is used to find the settings of control variables such as generator terminal voltages, transformer tap settings and reactive power output of shunt VAR compensators in order to achieve minimum active power loss, improved voltage profile and enhanced voltage stability. In this study, QODE has been tested on IEEE 30-bus, 57-bus and 118-bus test systems. Test results of the proposed QODE approach have been compared with those obtained by other evolutionary methods reported in the literature. It is found that the proposed QODE based approach is able to provide better solution.