Load frequency control of multi-area interconnected thermal power system: artificial intelligence-based approach

In the current work, an ant colony optimisation (ACO) optimisation technique for load frequency control was proposed for tuning the performance of the proportional-integral-derivative (PID) controller gain values. This led to oscillations suppression in the power system response. A system consisted of three equal thermal generating units equipped with (PID) controller was investigated. The PID controller gain values are obtained by using three different cost functions such as the integral square error (ISE), integral time absolute error (ITAE) and integral absolute error (IAE). Time domain specifications of the settling time and overshoot were considered in the system response analysis.