R. Kazemzadeh - Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Sahand University of Technology, Tabriz, Iran
M. Moazen - Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Sahand University of Technology, Tabriz, Iran
R. Ajabi-Farshbaf - Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Sahand University of Technology, Tabriz, Iran
M. Vatanpour - Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Sahand University of Technology, Tabriz, Iran

In this paper, a combinational optimization algorithm is introduced to obtain the best size and location of Static Compensator (STATCOM) in power systems. Its main contribution is considering contingency analysis where lines outages may lead to infeasible solutions especially at peak loads and it commonly can be vanished by load-shedding. The objective of the proposed algorithm is firstly to prevent infeasible power flow solutions without undesired load-shedding, which is critical in contingency analysis; and secondly to mitigate overall power losses and costs. Moreover, active and reactive powers generation costs are considered in the proposed objective function. Since there are various constraints such as lines outages number, cost and their duration that must be taken to account, Bacterial Foraging oriented by Particle Swarm Optimization (BF-PSO) algorithm combined with Optimal Power Flow (OPF) is used to solve and overcome the complexity of this combinational nonlinear problem. In order to validate the accuracy of the proposed method, two test systems, including IEEE ۳۰ bus standard system and Azarbaijan regional power system of Iran, are applied in simulation studies. All obtained optimization results show the effectiveness of the suggested combinational method in loss and cost reduction and preventing load-shedding.

BF-PSO Algorithm, Contingency Analysis, Optimal power flow, STATCOM Allocation