Multi-objective pareto optimal power quality improvement in distribution systems

Abstract The present study proposes a multi-objective optimized Electric Spring (ES) operation to improve the voltage regulation and overall power quality in a distribution system. A suitable controller has been designed for the ES implementing the Multi-objective artificial cooperative search (MOACS) optimization algorithm. The objectives are to enhance the system power factor, regulate the critical load voltage, and minimize the neutral current. The proposed technique provides satisfactory results with intermittent energy source also. The performance of MOACS has been compared with particle swarm optimization (PSO) and harmony search (HS) algorithms. It has been observed that the improvement in power factor and reduction of neutral current is much more with MOACS compared to PSO and HS. The power quality factors obtained with PSO are 0.9136, 0.9257, and 0.9146 for three different sets of loads, whereas, with HS, these values are 0.9072, 0.9324, and 0.8985. The same index improves to 0.9465, 0.9392, and 0.9307 with MOACS, which proves the efficacy of MOACS algorithm. The validation of the proposed scheme through real-time simulation confirms the reliability of this scheme.