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Voltage instability in power systems arises due to the shortage of reactive power and may cause abnormally low bus voltages leading to a partial or complete blackout. In order to maintain the system voltages within a safe limit, voltage control techniques such as shunt capacitor banks, Static VAR Compensators (SVCs), load shedding, and transformer tap-changer blocking, are employed. In this paper, a novel receding-horizon Model Predictive Control (MPC)-based voltage controller is proposed, which, by optimally controlling generator reactive power and SVC output, maintains the voltage stability of a power system. For this, a sensitivity-based analysis is performed to design a state-space model of the power system. The frequency and voltage dependency of load and generation are considered in the system equations. The voltage control is done step-wise, and the optimal control action in each step is calculated by minimizing a cost function subject to a set of relevant constraints. Different Voltage Stability Indices (VSIs) are used as a measure of voltage stability and also used in the constraints for the optimization problem. The performance of the proposed controller is evaluated on IEEE 9-, 39- and 118-bus systems, considering different types of loads and contingencies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]