Evaluation of the Influence of a High-Quality Initial Solution in the Coordination of DOCRs Using an ACO Algorithm

This paper evaluates the influence of a high-quality initial solution built with linear programming (LP) in the coordination of directional overcurrent relays (DOCRs) using an ant colony optimization (ACO) algorithm. The ACO-MV (Multi-variable) presented is an expansion of the ACO algorithm for continuous domain optimization problems adapted to mixed-variable optimization problems, summarized in two types of variables both continuous and categorical. In this work are two decision variables, TDS considered continuous and PS categorical. Normally, the initial solution is randomly generated, in addition, those results are compared by using the same random PS values for solving a relaxation of the DOCRs problem with LP to obtain new TDS values. To compare the advantage in the addition of LP for the initial solution this methodology evaluates three transmission systems (3, 8, and 15 Bus accordingly).