Comparative performance analysis of Artificial Bee Colony algorithm in automatic generation control for interconnected reheat thermal power system

This study extensively presents the Automatic Generation Control (AGC) application of Artificial Bee Colony (ABC) algorithm. This algorithm is one of the new population based optimization algorithms which have been developed since 2005. In this study, the algorithm is applied to the interconnected reheat thermal power system in order to tune the parameters of PI and PID controllers which are used for AGC. The tuning performance of the algorithm is compared with that of Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithm through transient response analysis method. In addition to these, the robustness analysis is applied to the power system which is optimized by ABC algorithm so as to determine its response towards changing in the load and the system parameters, varied in the range of ±50%. The behavior of the system is also investigated with this analysis towards the different cost functions such as integral of absolute error (IAE), integral of squared error (ISE), integral of time weighted squared error (ITSE) and integral of time multiplied absolute error (ITAE). At the end of the study, it is seen that the ABC algorithm is successfully applied to the AGC in the application of interconnected reheat thermal power system, and it shows better tuning capability than the other similar population based optimization algorithm. Furthermore, it is also seen that the proposed system is robust and is not affected by changing in the load, the power system parameters and the cost functions.

► Optimization of AGC with swarm intelligence based optimization algorithms.
► New application of ABC algorithm on AGC.
► Comparison of ABC and PSO algorithms.
► Detailed analyses on the performances of ABC algorithm.