Overview of metaheuristic optimization techniques applied to solving power engineering problems

The rapid growth of electric power systems around the world in the XX century, and the imperfection of computer technology at that time led the emergence of a number of problems associated with the management and distribution of electricity. The most important tasks solved in the design of new and modernization of existing systems are the problems of managing power flows, planning loads and reactive power, choosing the network configuration and others. All of them belong to a number of optimization problems, which for many years have been solved using traditional numerical methods: Newtonian methods, interior point, branch and bound method, nonlinear and quadratic programming, and others. In addition, the use of numerical methods led to difficulties in calculation of first and second order, which led to finding suboptimal solutions. The birth of heuristic and then metaheuristic optimization methods made it possible to simplify the preparation of mathematical models, and reduce the time of performing calculations, and the universality of new algorithms ensured their applicability for a wide range of tasks. The article describes the general sequence of performing optimization tasks using metaheuristic methods, describes the most important problems faced by modern electric power industry, lists popular metaheuristic optimization algorithms, describes their strengths and weaknesses, and lists the main areas of their application.