Improving Power System Reliability Calculation Efficiency With EPSO Variants

This paper presents an application of evolutionary particle swarm optimization (EPSO)-based methods to evaluate power system reliability. Population-based (PB) methods appear as competitors to the traditional Monte Carlo simulation (MCS), because they are computationally efficient in estimating a variety of reliability indices. The work reported in this paper demonstrates that EPSO variants can focus the search in the region of the state space where contributions to the formation of a reliability index may be found, instead of conducting a blind sampling of the space. The results obtained with EPSO are compared to MCS and with other PB methods.