Design of Power System Stabilizer Using Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) Technique

Modern civilization is driven mainly by electricity and hence a reliable and secure power system plays a vital role. One very important aspect of this vital system is stability. Over the years generations of power engineers studied the stability aspects and a lot of research was conducted and methods of maintaining the stability of this highly nonlinear distributed system of very high order are suggested. One of the developments over the years is use of supplementary signals to keep the system dynamically stable over a wide range of operating conditions. In power system parlance, this is called power system stabilizer (A controller). Various classical and modern control theory techniques are used to design power system stabilizers. This work address the problem of designing a power system stabilizer for a Single Machine Infinite Bus (SMIB) system. The SMIB is modelled as a fourth order system and the Power System Stabilizer (PSS) is designed using PID controller using Particle Swarm Optimization technique. The results obtained are compared with stabilizers designed using phase lead compensator and a PID controller using Ziegler-Nichols method. Comparison made for a small disturbance in the mechanical torque, for a wide range of operating conditions, to ensure robustness of the controller. The responses are generated using MATLAB-SIMULNK software