Integrated Demand Side Management and Generation Control for Frequency Control of a Microgrid Using PSO and FA based Controller

This paper applies demand side management (DSM) method as a new control strategy for frequency control in a microgrid powered by the diesel driven generator (DDG), wind and solar photovoltaic (PV) power sources. In order to level the frequency fluctuation due to intermittent power generation, the power consumption of the non-critical loads (i.e., heat pump, freezer) and power charging-discharging of plug-in hybrid vehicles (PHEV) are controlled through the controllers (PI/PID). The parameters of the controllers are optimized using Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) and Firefly Algorithm (FA). Different disturbance conditions such as step perturbation and random variations of load, solar PV and wind output power has been considered to investigate the performance of the microgrid. Simulation studies confirmed that the performance of the FA optimized PID controller is better than the PSO optimized PI/PID controllers and FA optimized PI controller in terms of frequency deviation and setting time.