Amin Zaheri - Department of Electrical Engineering, Ardabil Branch, Islamic Azad University, Ardabil, Iran
Gholamreza Aghajani - Department of Electrical Engineering, Ardabil Branch, Islamic Azad University, Ardabil, Iran

This paper presents a new multi objective Imperialism Competitive Algorithm (ICA) to find the feasible optimal solution of the reactive power dispatch problem with considering operational constraints of the generators. This problem is an important issue with non-linear structure in power industry that considered the both continuous and discrete control variables. The proposed technique is applied to find the settings of continuous and discrete control variables such as tap positions of tap changing transformers, generator voltages, and the amount of reactive compensation devices to optimize three conflicting and non-commensurable objective functions: voltage deviation, the total voltage stability and real power loss. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is demonstrated by comparing its performance with other evolutionary multi objective optimization algorithms. The computational results reveal that the proposed algorithm has excellent convergence characteristics and is superior to other multi objective optimization algorithms. Also, the results confirm its great potential in handling the multi objective problems in power systems

reactive power dispatch, ICA, Multi objective optimization