Hybrid bacterial foraging enhanced PSO algorithm for load frequency control of hydro-thermal multi-area power system and comparative analysis

Abstract

This work proposes the hybrid Bacterial Foraging enhanced Particle Swarm Optimization (BF-PSO) tuned proportional-integral (PI) controller for load frequency control (LFC) of interconnected 3-area power system comprising diverse sources of power. Area 1 of the 3-area power system is a thermal system with governor dead-band nonlinearity, area 2 is a reheat thermal system, whereas, area 3 is a hydro system with mechanical hydraulic governor. The multi area power system is investigated for frequency regulation under the effect of varying step load disturbance applied in all the three areas besides the reheat non linearity in one thermal area, dead band non linearity in second thermal area and different head levels in the hydro area. The simulation results clearly bring out the enhanced performance of the hybrid BF-PSO algorithm as against the BF, PSO, and conventional Ziegler-Nichols (ZN) algorithms, also implemented in this work for comparative analysis. The frequency and tie-line power deviations, peak overshoot, settling time, and minimum value of performance index are used as the performance measures. Simulations are carried out using MatLab/Simulink.