Fundamentals of the C-DEEPSO Algorithm and its Application to the Reactive Power Optimization of Wind Farms

Abstract

In this paper, a novel hybrid single-objective metaheuristic, the so called C-DEEPSO (Canonical Differential Evolutionary Particle Swarm Optimization), is proposed and tested. C-DEEPSO can be viewed as an evolutionary algorithm with recombination rules borrowed from PSO, or a swarm optimization method with selection and self-adaptiveness properties proper from DE. A case study on the problem of optimal control for reactive sources in energy production by Wind Power Plants (WPP), solved by means of Optimal Power Flow (OPF-like), is used to test the new hybrid algorithm and to evaluate its performance. C-DEEPSO is compared to the baseline algorithm, DEEPSO, and to a reference algorithm, Mean-Variance Mapping Optimization (MVMO). The experiments indicate that the proposed algorithm is efficient and competitive, capable to tackle this large-scale problem. The results also show that the new approach exhibits better results, when compared to MVMO.