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This paper applies the concept of fuzzy controller to voltage/VAR control. Cascading Mamdani controllers are used together with sensitivities to keep voltages in an admissible band while avoiding line flows to exceed admissible limits. A small number of iteration steps with a Newton-Raphson power flow routine are enough to recover voltages into admissible bands.

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This paper presents an application of Monte Carlo chronological simulation to evaluate the reserve requirements of generating systems, considering renewable energy sources. The idea is to investigate the behavior of reliability indices, including those from the well-being analysis, when the major portion of the energy sources is renewable. Renewable in this work comprises hydroelectric, mini-hydroelectric, and wind power sources. Case studies on a configuration of the Portuguese Generating System are presented and discussed. Copyright (c) 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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A major goal for managers of electric power networks is maximum asset performance. Minimal life cycle cost and maintenance optimization becomes crucial in reaching this goal, while meeting demands from customers and regulators. This necessitates the determination of the optimal balance between preventive and corrective maintenance in order to obtain the lowest total cost. The approach of this paper is to study the problem of balance between preventive and corrective maintenance as a multiobjective optimization problem, with customer interruptions on one hand and the maintenance budget of the network operator on the other. The problem is solved with meta-heuristics developed for the specific problem, in conjunction with an evolutionary particle swarm optimization algorithm. The maintenance optimization is applied in a case study to an urban distribution system in Stockholm, Sweden. Despite a general decreased level of maintenance (lower total maintenance cost), better network performance can be offered to the customers. This is achieved by focusing the preventive maintenance on components with a high potential for improvements. Besides this, this paper displays the value of introducing more maintenance alternatives for every component and choosing the right level of maintenance for the components with respect to network performance.

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This chapter presents EPSO (Evolutionary Particle Swarm Optimization), as an evolutionary meta-heuristic that implements a scheme of self-adaptive recombination, borrowing the movement rule from PSO (Particle Swarm Optimization). Besides the basic model, it discusses a Stochastic Star topology for the communication among particles and presents a variant called differential EPSO or dEPSO. The chapter presents results in a didactic Unit Commitment/Generator Scheduling Power System problem and results of a competition among algorithms in an intelligent agent platform for Energy Retail Market simulation where EPSO comes out as the winner algorithm. © 2007 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.

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