Aditya Bumanapalli - Department of Electronics & Communication EngineeringVNR VJIET, Hyderabad -

This paper presents Amplified Particle Swarm optimization (APSO) algorithm for solving reactive power problem in a power system. Particle swarm optimization (PSO) has received increasing interest from the optimization community due to its simplicity in implementation and itsinexpensive computational overhead. However, PSO has premature convergence, especially in complex multimodalfunctions. Extremal Optimization is a recently developed localsearch heuristic method and has been successfully applied to awide variety of hard optimization problems. To overcome the limitation of PSO, this paper proposes a novel hybrid algorithm,called amplified algorithm, through introducing extremal optimization into PSO. The hybrid approach elegantly combinesthe exploration ability of PSO with the exploitation ability of Extreme optimization. In order to evaluate the proposedalgorithm, it has been tested on IEEE 30 bus system and simulation results show the better performance of the proposedalgorithm

optimal reactive powe; Transmission loss; particleswarm; Particle swarm optimization; Extremal optimization