Power System Stability Enhancement via Bacteria Foraging Optimization Algorithm

Social foraging behavior of Escherichia coli bacteria has recently been explored to develop a novel algorithm for distributed optimization and control. The Bacterial Foraging Optimization Algorithm (BFOA) is currently gaining popularity in the community of researchers, for its effectiveness in solving certain difficult real world optimization problems. This paper proposes BFOA-based power system stabilizer (PSS) for the suppression of oscillations in power systems. The proposed design problem of PSS over a wide range of loading conditions and system configurations is formulated as an optimization problem. BFOA is employed to search for optimal controller parameters by minimizing the time domain objective function.The performance of the proposed technique has been evaluated with the performance of genetic algorithm, the Conventional one and no controller in order to demonstrate the superior efficiency of the proposed BFOA in tuning PSS controller. Simultaneous tuning of the Bacterial Foraging-based PSS gives robust damping performance over wide range of operating conditions, and system configurations in comparison to optimized PSS controller based on GA and conventional PSS.