Plenary Lecture
Heuristic and Metaheuristic Optimization Techniques with Application to
Power Systems
Professor Mihai Gavrilas
"Gh. Asachi" Technical University of Iasi
ROMANIA
E-mail: mgavrilas@yahoo.com
Abstract: The
development of modern wide-area power systems, as well as recent trends
towards the creation of sustainable energy systems have given birth to
complex studies addressing technical, but also economical and
environmental, aspects related to simple or multi-objective optimization
problems. Examples of optimization problems widely encountered in power
system applications are: normal operating conditions and post-fault
distribution network reconfiguration, reactive power planning, optimal
design of FACTs’ parameters, unit commitment, simple or multi-area
economic dispatch, generation expansion planning, optimal load shedding,
steady-state security analysis, state estimation, optimal power-flow,
distributed multi-generation system optimization, power plant control
and others. Most of these optimization problems are combinatorial in
nature, have nonsmooth and nondifferentiable objective functions, and
have lots of local minima. For this type of problems conventional
optimization techniques barely can find acceptable solutions or any
solution at all.
During the last decades, several heuristic techniques were proposed to
solve such difficult optimization problems. These techniques include:
simulated annealing, tabu search, genetic algorithms, immune algorithms,
memetic algorithms, symbolic regression, ant colony optimization,
particle swarm optimization, variable neighborhood search etc Recently,
metaheuristic approaches that apply combinations of different heuristics
with or without traditional search and optimization techniques were
proposed to be used to solve extremely complex problems. The main
advantage of the (meta)heuristics is that the problem can be solved
without a precise description of the optimization background; a simple
association between a solution representation and the objective
function(s) is enough.
The purpose of this presentation is to provide the audience with basic
knowledge of most widely used (meta) heuristic optimization techniques,
and how they are applied in common optimization problems in power
systems. Example applications will be presented to stress the
similarities and differences between different (meta)heuristics, their
advantages and their drawbacks.
Brief Biography of the Speaker:
Mihai Gavrilas was born in Iasi, Romania on February, 6, 1959. He
received the M.Sc. degree from the "Gh. Asachi" Technical University of
Iasi, Romania, in 1984. Between 1984 and 1988 he worked as a field
engineer and then as a design engineer in the field of power station and
substation building and design. Since 1988 he has been devoted to
education and research at the "Gh. Asachi" Technical University of Iasi,
where, at present, he is a professor with the Power System department,
inside the faculty of Electrical Engineering. In 1994 he received the Ph
D degree in power systems from the Technical University of Iasi. He is
reading courses on Power systems steady state and stability analysis,
Intelligent systems application in power systems and Electricity
markets. He has a remarkable scientific and educational experience being
the author or joint author of 11 books, and over 130 papers in the area
of power systems and intelligent systems applications, published in
international journals and conference proceedings (16 papers indexed by
ISI and other international databases). He also has a valuable project
management experience (project manager or member in the research team)
in over 40 research grants sponsored by research organizations and / or
research programs with partners from industry. He is an IEEE member
(Power and Energy Society, Computational Intelligence Society, Systems,
Man and Cybernetics Society) since 1994, and a CIGRE member since 2008.
His main research interests are directed towards multi-objective
optimization for power systems steady-state operating conditions, power
systems dynamics and control, state estimation and observability
analysis in power systems, and computational intelligence application in
power systems. He participated in the 8th WSEAS International Conference
on POWER SYSTEMS (PS 2008), Santander, Cantabria, Spain, and the 9-th
WSEAS / IASME International Conference on Electric Power Systems, High
Voltages, Electric Machines (POWER 2009), Genova, Italy. During POWER
2009 Conference he was invited as a Plenary Speaker to present a speech
on "Recent Advances and Applications of Synchronized Phasor Measurements
in Power Systems".
