The identification and localization of a fault are a basic requirement for optimal operation of a modern power system. An effective fault identification method significantly reduces outage time, improves the electrical supply reliability, and enhances the speed of protection control. This paper proposes a novel method based on the theory of the two-terminal traveling wave range to identify the fault location in a voltage source converter based high voltage direct current (VSC-HVDC) system containing mixed cable and overhead line segments. It uses variational mode decomposition (VMD) and the Teager energy operator (TEO) as a new method to detect the traveling wave fault through a fault signal. The effectiveness of the proposed method is verified via time domain simulation of the hybrid VSC-HVDC transmission system using PSCAD/EMTDC and MATLAB software. Simulation results show that the proposed method demonstrates high fault location accuracy and excellent robustness with a slight effect on transient resistance and fault types, and that it performs better than the existing transient detection techniques, such as wavelet transform and ensemble empirical mode decomposition.

In this paper, a novel improved Antlion optimization algorithm (IALO) has been proposed for solving three different IEEE power systems of optimal reactive power dispatch (ORPD) problem. Such three power systems with a set of constraints in transmission power networks such as voltage limitation of all buses, limitations of tap of all transformers, maximum power transmission limitation of all conductors and limitations of all capacitor banks have given a big challenge for global optimal solution search ability of the proposed method. The proposed IALO method has been developed by modifying new solution generation technique of standard antlion optimization algorithm (ALO). By optimizing three single objective functions of systems with 30, 57 and 118 buses, the proposed method has been demonstrated to be more effective than ALO in terms of the most optimal solution search ability, solution search speed and search stabilization. In addition, the proposed method has also been compared to other existing methods and it has obtained better results than approximately all compared ones. Consequently, the proposed IALO method is deserving of a potential optimization tool for solving ORPD problem and other optimization problems in power system optimization fields.

The detection, mitigation, and classification of power quality (PQ) disturbances have been issues of interest in the power system field. This paper proposes an approach to detect and classify various types of PQ disturbances based on the Stockwell transform (ST) and decision tree (DT) methods. At first, the ST is developed based on the moving, localizing, and scalable Gaussian window to detect five statistical features of PQ disturbances such as the high frequency of oscillatory transient, distinction between stationary and non-stationary, the voltage amplitude oscillation around an average value, the existence of harmonics in a disturbance signal, and the root mean square voltage at the internal period of sag, swell or interruption. Then, these features are classified into nine types, such as normal, sag, swell, interruption, harmonic, flicker, oscillatory transient, harmonic voltage sag, and harmonic voltage swell by using the DT algorithm that is based on a set of rules with the structure “if…then’’. This proposed study is simulated using MATLAB simulation. The IEEE 13-bus system, the recorded real data based on PQube, and the experiment based on the laboratory environment are applied to verify the effectiveness.

This paper presents a novel improved firefly algorithm (IFA) to deal the problem of the optimal operation of thermal generating units (OOTGU) with the purpose of reducing the total electricity generation fuel cost. The proposed IFA is developed based on combining three improvements. The first is to be based on the radius between two solutions, the second is updated step size for each considered solution based on different new equations, and the third is to slightly modify a formula producing new solutions by using normally distributed random numbers and canceling uniform random numbers of conventional firefly algorithm (FA). The effect of each proposed improvement on IFA is investigated by executing five benchmark functions and two different systems. The performance of IFA is investigated on six other study cases consisting of different types of objective function and complex level of constraints. The objective function considers single fuel with quadratic form and nonconvex form, and multifuels with the sum of several quadratic and nonconvex functions while a set of constraints taken into account are power loss, prohibited zone, ramp rate limit, spinning reserve, and all constraints in transmission power networks. The obtained results indicate the proposed improvements in terms of high optimal solution quality, stabilization of search ability, and fast convergence compared with FA. In addition, the comparisons with other methods also lead to a conclusion that the proposed method is a very promising optimization tool for systems with quadratic fuel cost function and with complicated constraints.

This paper applies a proposed modified stochastic fractal search algorithm (MSFS) for dealing with all constraints of optimal reactive power dispatch (ORPD) and finding optimal solutions for three different cases including power loss optimization, voltage deviation optimization, and L‐index optimization. The proposed MSFS method is newly constructed in the paper by modifying three new solution update mechanisms on standard stochastic fractal search algorithm (SSFS). The first modification is to keep only one formula and abandon one formula in the diffusion process while the second modification and the third modification are used in the first update and the second update. In two updates of SSFS, solutions with low quality are updated with high probability while other solutions with high quality do not get chances to be updated. This manner results in the fact that some promising solutions around the high quality solutions can be missed. In order to tackle this restriction, the second modification of MSFS is to newly update the worst solutions in the first update and the best solutions in the second update. In the third modification, all existing formulas of SSFS in the two updates are abandoned and the same new proposed technique is used for updating such solutions in two updates. Compared to SSFS, the three modifications can bring advantages to MSFS such as using smaller number of produced solutions per iteration, spending shorter execution time, finding better optimal solutions, and owning more stable search ability. Furthermore, the proposed method also sees its effectiveness and robustness over SSFS by testing on IEEE 30‐bus system and IEEE 118‐bus system with three different single objectives for each system. The proposed method can find less minimum, average, and maximum for all the cases in addition to faster search speed. Besides, the proposed method is also compared to other methods such as PSO‐based method group, GA‐based method group, DE‐based method group, and other recent methods. Result comparisons also indicate that the proposed method can be more efficient than almost all these methods with respect to less minimum and smaller values of control parameters. As a result, evaluation of the performance of the proposed method is that it should be used for seeking solutions of ORPD problem.