Power System Load Frequency Active Disturbance Rejection Control via Reinforcement Learning-Based Memetic Particle Swarm Optimization

Load frequency control (LFC) is necessary to guarantee the safe operation of power systems. Aiming at the frequency and power stability problems caused by load disturbances in interconnected power systems, active disturbance rejection control (ADRC) was designed. There are eight parameters that need to be adjusted for an ADRC, which are challenging to adjust manually, thus limiting the development of this approach in industrial applications. Regardless of the theory or application, there is still no unified and efficient parameter optimization method. The traditional particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm suffers from premature convergence and a high computational cost. Therefore, in this paper, we utilize an improved PSO algorithm, a reinforcement-learning-based memetic particle swarm optimization (RLMPSO), for the parameter tuning of ADRC to obtain better control performance for the controlled system. Finally, to highlight the advantages of the proposed RLMPSO-ADRC method and to prove its superiority, the results were compared with other control algorithms in both a traditional non-reheat two-area thermal power system and a non-linear power system with a governor dead band (GDB) and a generation rate constraint (GRC). Moreover, the robustness of the proposed method was tested by simulations with parameter perturbations and different working conditions. The simulation results showed that the proposed method can meet the demand for the frequency deviation to stabilize to 0 in LFC with higher performance, and it is worthy of popularization and application.