Performance enhancement of automatic generation control for a multi-area power system in the presence of communication delay

This paper presents the effect of communication delay on Automatic Generation Control (AGC) and introduces a Genetic Algorithm (GA) based control to achieve the optimal performance of Load Frequency Control (LFC) in the presence of communication delay. Future of power system and smart grid has tied in open communication infrastructures and study of power system without considering communication parameters will not be practical, realistic and accurate. Effect of communication parameters such as delay of communication link and packet loss has not been considered in most of the studies investigating automatic generation control and its performance using different methods and optimization techniques. This paper investigates the effect of communication delay on decentralized load frequency control in different scenarios. Integrator controller is the most common controller in LFC studies because of its design simplicity. However, this study takes advantage of PID controller, which has the best performance but the most complex design using genetic algorithm to find the optimal gains of the PID controllers. The results show that by use of genetic algorithm, automatic generation control still can keep track of load deviations and keep the frequency and tie-lines power close to their nominal and scheduled values even in the presence of significant communication delay.