A Review on Optimal Power Flow Problems: Conventional and Metaheuristic Solutions

Optimal power flow (OPF) of power system consists in solving an optimization problem in relation to a criterion (economic or technic), called fitness function, while respecting equality and inequality constraints. The selected optimization criterion in this paper is the fuel cost of generation. For this, we are going to present a review of most conventional and metaheuristic solution methods used in literature. In order to demonstrate the advance of metaheuristic methods compared to conventional ones for OPF problem solution, we propose an application example using both interior point method (IPM) and the particle swarm optimization (PSO). The review study allowed us a better understanding of OPF problem and method solutions given in literature.