International Journal of Swarm Intelligence Research, 1(3), 51-66, July-September 2010 51 Copyright © 2010, IGI Global. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited. Keywords: Congestion, Deregulation, Evolutionary Programming, Optimal Power Flow, Particle Swarm Optimization and Hybrid PSO Techniques, System Security InTrOducTIOn Deregulation is a new paradigm in the electric power industry. The goal of deregulation is to enhance competition and bring consumer’s new choices and economic benefits. Power system security, congestion management, power qual- ity and power regulations are major concepts that draw the attention of power researchers in deregulated surroundings. In deregulated elec- tricity market, most of the time power system operates near its rated capacity as each player congestion Management using hybrid Particle Swarm Optimization Technique Sujatha Balaraman, Government College of Engineering, India N. Kamaraj, Thiagarajar College of Engineering, India ABSTrAcT This paper proposes the Hybrid Particle Swarm Optimization (HPSO) method for solving congestion manage- ment problems in a pool based electricity market. Congestion may occur due to lack of coordination between generation and transmission utilities or as a result of unexpected contingencies. In the proposed method, the control strategies to limit line loading to the security limits are by means of minimum adjustments in generations from the initial market clearing values. Embedding Evolutionary Programming (EP) technique in Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithm improves the global searching capability of PSO and also prevents the premature convergence in local minima. A number of functional operating constraints, such as branch fow limits and load bus voltage magnitude limits are included as penalties in the ftness function. Numerical results on three test systems namely modifed IEEE 14 Bus, IEEE 30 Bus and IEEE 118 Bus systems are pre- sented and the results are compared with PSO and EP approaches in order to demonstrate its performance. in the market is trying to gain as much as pos- sible by full utilization of existing resources. Congestion in the transmission lines is one of the technical problems that appear particularly in the deregulated environment. Congestion management methods reported in literature are as follows. OPF based congestion management is pro- posed in (Alfredo, Cuello-reyna, & Jose, 2005) using differential evolution as an optimization tool. (Conejo, Milano, & Garcia-Bertrand, 2006) addressed congestion management using classical approach considering voltage stabil- ity. Congestion management based on multi DOI: 10.4018/jsir.2010070104