Bacteria foraging optimization algorithm based load frequency controller for interconnected power system

Social foraging behavior of Escherichia coli bacteria has recently been explored to develop a novel algorithm for distributed optimization and control. The Bacterial Foraging Optimization Algorithm (BFOA), as it is called now, is currently gaining popularity in the community of researchers, for its effectiveness in solving certain difficult real world optimization problems. This paper proposes BFOA based Load Frequency Control (LFC) for the suppression of oscillations in power system. A two area non-reheat thermal system is considered to be equipped with proportional plus integral (PI) controllers. BFOA is employed to search for optimal controller parameters by minimizing the time domain objective function. The performance of the proposed controller has been evaluated with the performance of the conventional PI controller and PI controller tuned by genetic algorithm (GA) in order to demonstrate the superior efficiency of the proposed BFOA in tuning PI controller. Simulation results emphasis on the better performance of the optimized PI controller based on BFOA in compare to optimized PI controller based on GA and conventional one over wide range of operating conditions, and system parameters variations. © 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.