ANT COLONY OPTIMIZATION FOR NEW REDESIGN PROBLEM OF MULTI{STATE ELECTRICAL POWER SYSTEMS

The most important phase in many industrial applications is the design problem. Usually the demand increases randomly with time in the form of a cumulative demand curve. To adapt the power system capacity to the demand a new design is predicted. This paper uses an ant colony optimization (ACO) method to solve the new redesign problem for multi-state series-parallel power systems. The study horizon is divided into several periods. A multiple-choice of components can be chosen and included into subsystem component at any stage to improve the system performance. The components are characterized by their cost, performance and availability. The objective is to minimize the investment over the study period while satisfying availability or performance constraints. A universal generating function technique is applied to evaluate power system availability. The ant colony approach is required to identify the optimal combination of components with dieren t parameters to be allocated in parallel. K e y w o r d s: new redesign, ant colony, multi-state, power system, universal generating moment function