Differential Evolution for Optimization of PID Gains in Automatic Generation Control

Automatic generation control (AGC) of a multi area power system provides power demand signals for AGC power generators to control frequency and tie-line power flow due to the large load changes or other disturbances. Occurrence of large megawatt imbalance causes large frequency deviations from its nominal value which may be a threat to secure operation of power system. To avoid such situation, emergency control to maintain the system frequency using differential evolution (DE) based proportionalintegral-derivative (PID) controller is proposed in this paper. DE is one of the most powerful stochastic real parameter optimization in current use. DE based optimum gains give better optimal transient response of frequency and tie line power changes compared to particle swarm optimization based gains.