Gravitational Search Algorithm based Automatic Generation Control for interconnected power system

This paper presents the design and performance analysis of Gravitational Search Algorithm (GSA) based Proportional-Integral (PI) controller for Automatic Generation Control (AGC) of an interconnected power system. A two area non-reheat thermal system equipped with PI controllers which is widely used in literature is considered for the design and analysis purpose. The design problem is formulated as an optimization problem and GSA is employed to search for optimal controller parameters. Three different objective functions using Integral Time multiply Absolute Error (ITAE), damping ratio of dominant eigen values and settling times of frequency and tie line power deviations with appropriate weight coefficients are derived in order to increase the performance of the controller. The superiority of the proposed GSA optimized PI controller is demonstrated by comparing the results with some recently published modern heuristic optimization techniques such as Bacteria Foraging Optimization Algorithm (BFOA) and Genetic Algorithm (GA) based PI controller for the same interconnected power system. It is observed that the dynamic performance of GSA optimized PI controller is better than BFOA and GA optimized PI controllers.