Application of firefly algorithm with online wavelet filter in automatic generation control of an interconnected reheat thermal power system

This paper presents the implementation of the Firefly Algorithm (FA) with an online wavelet filter on the automatic generation control (AGC) model for a three unequal area interconnected reheat thermal power system. The model includes time delay, dead zone, boiler, Generation Rate Constraint (GRC), and high frequency noise components. A novel filtering technique based on wavelet transform is introduced for the purpose of removing noise(s) from the ACE signal. The performance of the filter is measured by formulating a signal integrity index. The simulation results show that the FA is able to outperform the Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) in obtaining the minimum objective function based on Integral of Time Weighted Squared Error (ITSE). The results also shows that the proposed online wavelet filter performs with a higher degree of efficiency compared to the conventional low pass filter when the practical model of the AGC is analyzed. Further investigation by varying the GRC and time delay parameter confirms the robustness of the FA tuned controller with the online wavelet filter.