Optimal reactive power planning using evolutionary algorithms: a comparative study for evolutionary programming, evolutionary strategy, genetic algorithm, and linear programming

This paper presents a comparative study for three evolutionary algorithms (EAs) to the optimal reactive power planning (ORPP) problem: evolutionary programming, evolutionary strategy, and genetic algorithm. The ORPP problem is decomposed into P- and Q-optimization modules, and each module is optimized by the EAs in an iterative manner to obtain the global solution. The EA methods for the ORPP problem are evaluated against the IEEE 30-bus system as a common testbed, and the results are compared against each other and with those of linear programming.