AUTOMATIC GENERATION CONTROL OF A THERMAL POWER PLANT WITH REHEAT TURBINE USING PSO OPTIMIZED INTEGRAL CONTROLLER

In this paper an approach has been presented for load frequency control of a singlearea thermal power plant with reheat turbine. Integral controller has been preferred for control of manipulated variable of the control system representing a single-area thermal power system, since the basic intention of load frequency control execution is to annihilate the frequency deviation resulting from step load disturbance acting on a power system. The gain of the integral controller is optimized with the help of Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) technique. Various objective functions such as IAE (Integral Absolute Error), ITAE (Integral Time Absolute Error), ITSE (Integral Time Square Error) and ISE (Integral Square Error) are used as benchmark criteria for optimizing the gain of the controller. The controller performance exhibits divergence based upon objective functions. In the second part of the research, we have tested the system for robustness by administrating the system performance for parameter variations. The simulation results have affirmed the robust performance of the system