What is Weighting Factors

This chapter introduces a novel technique to evaluate composite power system reliability indices and their sensitivities with respect to the control parameters using a dynamically directed binary Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) search method. A key point in using PSO in power system reliability evaluation lies in selecting the weighting factors associated with the objective function. In this context, the work presented here proposes a solution method to adjust such weighting factors in a dynamic fashion so that the swarm would always fly on the entire search space rather of being trapped to one corner of the search space. Further, a heuristic technique based on maximum capacity flow of the transmission lines is used in classifying the state space into failure, success, and unclassified subspaces. The failure states in the unclassified subspace can be discovered using binary PSO technique. The effectiveness of the proposed method has been demonstrated on the IEEE RTS.