Study of differential search algorithm based automatic generation control of an interconnected thermal-thermal system with governor dead-band

An attempt has been made to the effective application of a recently introduced, powerful optimization technique called differential search algorithm (DSA), for the first time to solve load frequency control (LFC) problem in power system. In this paper, initially, DSA optimized classical PI/PIDF controller is implemented to an identical two-area thermal-thermal power system and then the study is extended to two more realistic power systems which are widely used in the literature. To assess the usefulness of DSA, three enhanced competitive algorithms namely comprehensive learning particle swarm optimization (CLPSO), ensemble of mutation and crossover strategies and parameters in differential evolution (EPSDE), and success history based DE (SHADE) are studied in this paper. Moreover, the superiority of proposed DSA optimized PI/PID/PIDF controller is validated by an extensive comparative analysis with some recently published meta-heuristic algorithms such as firefly algorithm (FA), bacteria foraging optimization algorithm (BFOA), genetic algorithm (GA), craziness based particle swarm optimization (CRPSO), differential evolution (DE), teaching-learning based optimization (TLBO), particle swarm optimization (PSO), and quasi-oppositional harmony search algorithm (QOHSA). A case of robustness and sensitivity analysis has been performed for the concerned test system under parametric uncertainty and random load perturbation. Furthermore, to demonstrate the efficacy of proposed DSA, the system nonlinearities like reheater of the steam turbine and governor dead band are included in the system modeling. The extensive results presented in this article demonstrate that proposed DSA can effectively improve system dynamics and may be applied to real-time LFC problem.