Application of flower pollination algorithm in load frequency control of multi-area interconnected power system with nonlinearity

This work presents an application of bio-inspired flower pollination algorithm (FPA) for tuning proportional–integral–derivative (PID) controller in load frequency control (LFC) of multi-area interconnected power system. The investigated power system comprises of three equal thermal power systems with appropriate PID controller. The controller gain [proportional gain (K _p), integral gain (K _i) and derivative gain (K _d)] values are tuned by using the FPA algorithm with one percent step load perturbation in area 1 (1 % SLP). The integral square error (ISE) is considered the objective function for the FPA. The supremacy performance of proposed algorithm for optimized PID controller is proved by comparing the results with genetic algorithm (GA) and particle swarm optimization (PSO)-based PID controller under the same investigated power system. In addition, the controller robustness is studied by considering appropriate generate rate constraint with nonlinearity in all areas. The result cumulative performance comparisons established that FPA-PID controller exhibit better performance compared to performances of GA-PID and PSO-PID controller-based power system with and without nonlinearity effect.