Hybrid BFOA-PSO approach for SSSC damping controller design

Social foraging behaviour of Escherichia coli bacteria has recently been explored to develop a novel algorithm for optimization and control. One of the major driving forces of Bacterial Foraging Optimization Algorithm (BFOA) is the chemotactic movement of a virtual bacterium that models a trial solution of the optimization problem. However, during the process of chemotaxis, the BFOA depends on random search directions which may lead to delay in reaching the global solution. This paper comes up with a hybrid approach involving Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) and BFOA algorithm called Bacterial Swarm Optimization (BSO) for designing Static Synchronous Series Compensator (SSSC) in a power system. In BSO, the search directions of tumble behaviour for each bacterium are oriented by the individual's best location and the global best location of PSO. The proposed hybrid algorithm has been extensively compared with BFOA and PSO. Simulation results have shown the validity of the proposed BSO in tuning SSSC compared with BFOA and PSO. Moreover, the results are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed controller to improve the power system stability over a wide range of loading conditions.