<![CDATA[Optimal reactive power dispatch (ORPD) is an important task for achieving more economical, secure and stable state of the electrical power system. It is expressed as a complex optimization problem where many meta-heuristic techniques have been proposed to overcome various complexities in solving ORPD problem. A meta-heuristic search mechanism is characterized by exploration and exploitation of the search space. The balance between these two characteristics is a challenging problem to attain the best solution quality. The artificial bee colony (ABC) algorithm as a reputed meta-heuristic has proved its goodness at exploration and weakness at exploitation where the enhancement of the basic ABC version becomes necessary. Salp swarm algorithm (SSA) is a newly developed swarm-based meta-heuristic, which has the best local search capability by using the best global solution in each iteration to discover promising solutions. In this paper, a novel hybrid approach-based ABC and SSA algorithms (ABC-SSA) is that developed to enhance the exploitation capability of the ABC algorithm using SSA and applied for solving ORPD problem. The efficiency of ABC-SSA is investigated using two standard test systems IEEE-30 and IEEE-300 buses, and that by considering the famous objective functions in ORPD problem.]]>
