Blended Crossover Continuous Ant Colony Optimization and Stability Index Tracing for Effective FACTS Devices Installation.

Recently, the two commonly implemented techniques for installing Flexible AC Transmission System (FACTS) devices are optimization approach and sensitivity analysis, although there are lots of other methods available for the same purpose. Alternatively, there are also various power tracing methods developed by researchers, unfortunately, the application is rather limited as they are only applied for transmission service pricing, especially in deregulated power system. By incorporating the tracing algorithm, this paper intends to present a novel method for determining the exact locations for FACTS devices placement, that is, Fast Voltage Stability Index Load Tracing (FVSI-LT). After experimentation on IEEE 57-bus reliability test system (RTS) considering normal and multi-contingencies condition, it is revealed that the proposed method provides a sense of reliability in terms of voltage stability enhancement while at the same time proves its capability to be applied into real system. Moreover, a new hybrid algorithm, Blended Crossover Continuous Ant Colony Optimization (BX-CACO) has also been proposed and it is observed that this algorithm reflects an impressive performance in terms of computation time and solution optimality after comparing with other Artificial Intelligence (AI) algorithms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]