Application of improved PSO to power flow control by TCSC for maximum acceptance of requested wheeled power

Open access to electric power transmission networks has been carried out in order to foster generation competition and customer choice worldwide. When several PPSs request to simultaneously supply power to customers based on bilateral contracts, it is expected that the transmission network accepts amounts of wheeled power requested by the PPSs as much as possible. It is possible to maximize total requested wheeled power by controlling power flow through transmission lines. It is well known that FACTS device is available to control line flow flexibly. In this paper, in order to maximize total wheeled power simultaneously requested by several PPSs, the authors propose an algorithm to determine the optimal reactance of TCSC (a type of FACTS device). The proposed algorithm is based on Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO), which is an optimization method based on swarm intelligence. In the proposed algorithm, PSO is improved to enhance ability of searching global minimum by giving different characteristic to behavior of each agent. In order to check the validity of the proposed method, numerical results are shown for 6 and IEEE 30 bus system models.