UNIFIED POWER FLOW CONTROLLER DESIGN FOR POWER SYSTEM STABILITY ENHANCEMENT VIA BACTERIA FORAGING OPTIMIZATION ALGORITHM

Abstract

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), as it is called now, 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 Unified Power Flow Controller (UPFC) for the suppression of oscillations in power system. The proposed design problem of UPFC over a wide range of loading conditions and system configurations is formulated as an optimization problem with an eigenvalue based objective function. Moreover, supplementary damping controller is superimposed on UPFC to enhance the suppression of these oscillations. BFOA is employed to search for optimal controllers parameters. The proposed controllers are tested on a power system. The nonlinear simulation results and eigenvalue analysis show the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed approach over a wide range of loading conditions and system parameters variations