A novel hybrid approach based artificial bee colony and salp swarm algorithms for solving ORPD problem

Optimal reactive power dispatch (ORPD) is an important task for achieving more economical, secure and stable state of the electrical power system. It is expressed as a complex optimization problem where many meta-heuristic techniques have been proposed to overcome various complexities in solving ORPD problem. A meta-heuristic search mechanism is characterized by exploration and exploitation of the search space. The balance between these two characteristics is a challenging problem to attain the best solution quality. The artificial bee colony (ABC) algorithm as a reputed metaheuristic has proved its goodness at exploration and weakness at exploitation where the enhancement of the basic ABC version becomes necessary. Salp swarm algorithm (SSA) is a newly developed swarm-based meta-heuristic, which has the best local search capability by using the best global solution in each iteration to discover promising solutions. In this paper, a novel hybrid approach-based ABC and SSA algorithms (ABC-SSA) is that developed to enhance the exploitation capability of the ABC algorithm using SSA and applied for solving ORPD problem. The efficiency of ABC-SSA is investigated using two standard test systems IEEE-30 and IEEE-300 buses, and that by considering the famous objective functions in ORPD problem.