In future electricity industry transferring high quality of power is essential. In this case, using Flexible AC Transmission System (FACTS) devices is inevitable. FACTS devices are used for controlling the voltage, stability, power flow and security of transmission lines. Therefore, finding the optimal locations for these devices in power networks is necessary. There are several varieties of FACTS devices with different characteristics, deployed for different purposes. Imperialist Competitive (IC) algorithm is a recently developed optimization technique, applied in power systems. IC algorithm is a new heuristic approach for global optimization searches based on the concept of imperialistic competition. In this paper, an IEEE 4-bus system is deployed as a case study in order to demonstrate the results of this novel approach using MATLAB.

In this paper, we present a new Imperialist Competitive Algorithm (ICA) to solve a bi-objective unrelated parallel machine scheduling problem where setup times are sequence dependent. The objectives include mean completion time of jobs and mean squares of deviations from machines workload from their averages. The performance of the proposed ICA (PICA) method is examined using some randomly generated data and they are compared with three alternative methods including particle swarm optimization (PSO), original version of imperialist competitive algorithm (OICA) and genetic algorithm (GA) in terms of the objective function values. The preliminary results indicate that the proposed study outperforms other alternative methods. In addition, while OICA performs the worst as alternative solution strategy, PSO and GA seem to perform better.

This paper addresses the problem of lot sizing and scheduling problem for n-products and m-machines in flow shop environment where setups among machines are sequence-dependent and can be carried over. Many products must be produced under capacity constraints and allowing backorders. Since lot sizing and scheduling problems are well-known strongly NP-hard, much attention has been given to heuristics and metaheuristics methods. This paper presents two metaheuristics algorithms namely, Genetic Algorithm (GA) and Imperialist Competitive Algorithm (ICA). Moreover, Taguchi robust design methodology is employed to calibrate the parameters of the algorithms for different size problems. In addition, the parameter-tuned algorithms are compared against a presented lower bound on randomly generated problems. At the end, comprehensive numerical examples are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms. The results showed that the performance of both GA and ICA are very promising and ICA outperforms GA statistically.