This paper presents the framework of a power-dispatching automation system (PDAS) based on a virtual private cloud, which extracts advantages of technologies, such as a virtual private cloud, a virtual private network, an https protocol, etc. Unlike existing on-premise or public cloud hosted PDASs that are vulnerable and may be subject to blackouts due to extreme conditions, such as natural disasters or cyberattacks, the proposed framework operates more safely and securely under those conditions, while at the same time meeting the reliability requirements for power systems as well. This paper presents the theory, architectural design, characteristics, and implementation process of the system, as well as its reliability and cyber security measurements. The annual failure time of the proposed system is reduced from 61.2 to about 0.43 min, about 142 times less than those of existing PDASs. This framework has been implemented in the Lipu power system in China since May 2016. Results show that the proposed system is reliable, safe, and cost-effective, with a bright prospect for future applications.

Multiobjective optimal reactive power dispatch (MORD) is a highly constrained nonlinear nondifferential multimodal Pareto optimization problem with a mixture of continuous and discrete variables. This paper presents a novel strength Pareto multigroup search optimizer (SPMGSO) for solving this challenging problem. In the proposed algorithm, a number of enhancement mechanisms, such as ring-migration synergistic cooperation, crowding entropy constraint treatment, and chaotic logistic dispersion, were developed to effectively strengthen the diversity and distribution of the resulting nondominated front (NDF). The final best compromise solution is then extracted from the NDF using a hierarchical clustering and an equilibria-based multicriteria decision-making scheme. In addition, the multicore processing was introduced to parallelize the multigroup search so as to greatly improve the execution speed of the algorithm. Computational studies on the benchmark IEEE 30-bus and 162-bus power systems have confirmed the superior performance and improvement of the proposed algorithm for solving this Pareto problem, and demonstrated its applicability and capability to cope with the high-dimensional MORD problems with multiple operational objectives.