This paper presents an Improved Catastrophic Genetic Algorithm (ICGA) for optimal reactive power optimization. Firstly, a new catastrophic operator to enhance the genetic algorithms' convergence stability is proposed. Then, a new probability algorithm of crossover depending on the number of generations, and a new probability algorithm of mutation depending on the fitness value are designed to solving the main conflict of the convergent speed with the global astringency. In these ways, the ICGA

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... an prevent premature convergence and instability of genetic-catastrophic algorithms (GCA). Finally, the ICGA is applied for power system reactive power optimization and evaluated on the IEEE 14-bus power system, and the application results show that the proposed method is suitable for reactive power optimization in power system.