Electrical Engineering https://doi.org/10.1007/s00202-020-00986-9 ORIGINAL PAPER Reactive power market clearing mechanism considering new clearing constraints: a separate clearing approach Elahe Sahraie 1 · Alireza Hassannejad Marzouni 1 · Alireza Zakariazadeh 1 · Mostafa Gholami 1 Received: 19 June 2019 / Accepted: 24 March 2020 © Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020 Abstract In this paper, a new clearing method for the separate reactive power market aiming at improving the reactive power com- pensation quality is presented. To analyze the performance of the proposed clearing method, indices including profitability rates for power suppliers, participation rates of power suppliers and fair distribution of the revenue and net surpluses have been developed. Robustness and efficiency of the proposed clearing method are tested on the 24-bus IEEE RTS system, and the market problem is solved by a multi-objective evolutionary algorithm based on decomposition. The results evidence that the proposed clearing method improves the quality of reactive power compensation if compared with the available market clearing methods. Keywords Reactive power · Market clearing · Multi-objective optimization List of symbols Indices i , j Bus number u Unit number N B Total number of system buses NU i Total number of generating units connected to bus i Parameters Q i ,u G min Minimum reactive power generation of bus i , unit u B Alireza Zakariazadeh zakaria@mazust.ac.ir Elahe Sahraie E.sahraie@mazust.ac.ir Alireza Hassannejad Marzouni alireza.hassannejad@mazust.ac.ir Mostafa Gholami m.gholami@mazust.ac.ir 1 Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Science and Technology of Mazandaran, Behshahr, Iran Q i ,u G max Maximum reactive power generation of bus i , unit u Q D i Total reactive demand of bus i P D i Total active demand of bus i Y i , j Line admittance magnitude between bus i and j θ ij Line admittance angle between bus i and j C i ,u 0 MCP of bus i unit u for unit availability ( $/(MVar h) ) C i ,u 1 MCP of bus i , unit u for reactive power absorp- tion in zone ( Q min , 0) ( $/(MVar h) ) C i ,u 2 MCP of bus i , unit u for reactive power genera- tion in zone ( Q base , Q A ) ( $/(MVar h) ) C i ,u 3 MCP of bus i , unit u for reactive power genera- tion in zone ( Q A , Q B ) ( $/(MVar h) ˆ 2 ) a i ,u 0 Proposed availability price for bus i unit u ( $/(MVar h) ) M i ,u 1 Proposed price of unit u connected to bus i for zone ( Q min , 0) ( $/(MVar h) ) M i ,u 2 Proposed price of unit u connected to bus i for zone ( Q base , Q A ) ( $/(MVar h) ) M i ,u 3 Proposed price of unit u connected to bus i for zone ( Q A , Q B ) ( $/(MVar h) ˆ 2 ) Q i ,u av,G max Maximum reactive power available for unit u connected to bus i Q i ,u av,G min Minimum reactive power available for unit u connected to bus i 123