Load Frequency Control of a Nonlinear Power System via Demand Response Control Strategy Based Fractional Order Fuzzy Controller

Effective frequency regulation can be severely hampered due to nonlinear components and channel delay in control loops of interconnected power systems. Currently employed conventional control techniques for regulating such systems often succumb to these associated complexities, thereby rendering the interconnected power system's unsatisfactory operation. To address these issues, this article presents an innovative methodology for effective frequency regulation by hybridizing intelligent control architecture with a demand response control strategy (DRCS). The utilized intelligent control architecture, based on fractional order fuzzy logic controller, effectively handles the uncertainties and nonlinearities in the control loop components. DRCS incorporates a smart load utilization for the swift restoration of nominal frequency, aiming to reduce the effort taken by secondary controllers. Further, to verify the proposed hybrid control configuration's effectiveness, extensive investigations are carried out, post optimal tuning of all the considered control architectures by a recently proposed improved bioinspired optimization algorithm. Based on the carried out investigation, a comparative study has been drawn amongst the proposed control scheme's performance and other recently devised inline control methods, i.e., fractional order PID (FOPID) and a fractional order fuzzy FOPID controller without DRCS. The proposed control scheme provided superior performance even under the presence of significant nonlinearities, uncertainties, and channel delay in the control loop.