Bacteria Foraging: A New Technique for Optimal Design of FACTS Controller to Enhance Power System Stability

This paper proposes Bacteria Foraging Optimization Algorithm (BFOA) based Static Var Compensator (SVC) for the suppression of oscillations in a multimachine power system. The proposed design problem of SVC over a wide range of loading conditions is formulated as an optimization problem with an eigenvalue based objective function. BFOA is employed to search for optimal controller parameters. The performance of the proposed technique has been evaluated with the performance of Genetic Algorithm (GA) to demonstrate the superior efficiency of the proposed BFOA in tuning SVC controller. Simultaneous tuning of the Bacteria Foraging based SVC (BFSVC) gives robust damping performance over a wide range of operating conditions in compare to optimized SVC controller based on GA (GASVC). Key-Words: SVC; Multimachine Power System; Genetic Algorithm; Bacteria Foraging; DShape.