Automatic Generation Control of Two Area Reheat Thermal Power System Using Differential Evolution Based Controller

Frequency fluctuation and deviation in tie-line power flow are occurred in a large power system due to unanticipated imbalance between energy production and consumers load demand. A crucial task is carried out by the Automatic Generation Control (AGC) to regulate the generators output power within an acceptable limit due to load perturbation for maintaining the stable system frequency and power flow. This paper illustrates the performance analysis of two area reheat thermal power system through simulation by employing a Proportional-Integral (PI) controller which is being optimized by Differential Evolution (DE) algorithm. DE is used for determining the optimal set of PI controller's gain parameters (K p and K i ) which depends on the eigenvalue of system matrix of state space equation and objective function's minimum value. Applying load variation in either or both of the areas, the performance of the controller is evaluated by analyzing the transient response of the system. Genetic Algorithm (GA) based PI controller has been considered for comparing the efficacy with the suggested controller which shows the proposed controller's supremacy in most of the cases. Moreover, the proposed controller has performed satisfactorily over variation of system parameters. Required simulations are performed in MATLAB/SIMULINK environment.