GA based PID controller for Load Frequency Control

In recent years electricity has been used to power more sophisticated and technically complex manufacturing processes, computers and computer networks, operation theatres in hospitals and a variety of other hightechnology consumer goods. These products and processes are sensitive not only to the continuity of power supply but also on the quality of power supply such as voltage and frequency. Thus, voltage and frequency should be maintained within the specified limit in order to ensure the reliability and quality of power supply. The conventional load frequency controllers are slow and lack in efficiency. It exhibits zero steady state error but lead to large deviations in frequency and voltage under varying load conditions. Hence an intelligent and efficient controller is required to maintain the system frequency at nominal value. The Genetic Algorithm (GA) based controller is proposed in this paper for load frequency control in order to achieve stable convergence characteristics, good computational efficiency and easy implementation. Optimal gains are obtained using genetic algorithm for varying loads and provide better performance in settling time, overshoot and oscillations than conventional PID controllers. The two area interconnected power system was modeled using MATLAB simulink package and simulated for various load changes. The simulation result shows that the proposed method achieves 79% reduction in peak overshoot and reduction of 77% in Oscillation.