An Improved ACO Algorithm Optimized Fuzzy PID Controller for Load Frequency Control in Multi Area Interconnected Power Systems

In this paper, an Improved Ant Colony Optimization (IACO) algorithm optimized fuzzy PID (FPID) controller is proposed for Load Frequency Control of multi area systems. The nonlinear incremental evaporation rate and improvement of pheromone increment updating are proposed in the IACO algorithm to improve the quality of solution. And, a modified objective function using integral time multiply absolute error (ITAE), overshoot, undershoot and settling time with appropriate weight coefficients is proposed to improve the performance of the controller. Initially, a two-area non-reheat thermal system is applied and the FPID controller parameters are optimized by the IACO algorithm with five different objective functions. The modified objective function has better performances than four conventional objective functions. To demonstrate the robustness of the proposed control method, sensitivity analysis is implemented under wide variation of operating conditions and system parameters. Further, the proposed approach is also extended to two-area four-sources hydro thermal power system with/without High Voltage Direct Current (HVDC) link. The superiority of the proposed approach is shown by comparing the results with ZN, GA and hPSO-PS algorithms. The robustness of the proposed method is verified under random load disturbances. Finally, the proposed approach is extended to a two-area power system with governor dead band nonlinearity and results show that the proposed approach can cope with nonlinearity well. The results obtained from all simulations show that the proposed algorithm and modified objective function achieves better performances, such as minimum objective values (ITAE = 0.0255, ITSE = 9.30e-5, ISE = 1.91e-4 and IAE = 0.0273) obtained for the two-area non-reheat thermal system.