Abstract
As the world’s population grows and energy demand increases, it is necessary to increase the scale of the electrical system, which is more complicated. Consequently, adopting automatic generation control (AGC) scheme to meet the demand becomes inevitable. In this article, the fusion of flower pollinated algorithm (FPA) and pathfinder algorithm (PFA), named hereafter as h FPAPFA, is proposed to achieve maximum control efficiency by combining the exploitation of FPA with the exploration capacity of PFA. The proposed h FPAPFA is meant to regulate two unequal multi-area interconnected power system with different generating units such as thermal, hydro, wind power and diesel plants. The proposed control scheme aims to achieve this by using the new algorithm to optimize the fractional-order set-point weighted PID (FOSWPID) parameters under time domain-based fitness functions namely, integral time square error (ITSE) and integral time absolute error (ITAE) while simultaneously minimizing the power losses. Employing the same interconnected power systems, a comparative study with some recent approaches in renowned journals is conducted. The performance of the proposed method is observed under diverse load conditions scenarios. Moreover, three nonlinearities including boiler dynamics, the governor dead band (GDB) and generation rate constraints (GRC) are further integrated into the system from a pragmatic context. Finally, sensitivity tests involving various parameter changes and the introduction of random step load perturbations are carried out. From the results, the proposed approach outperformed other approaches under different load condition scenarios, incorporation of nonlinearities and random load perturbation, demonstrating the proposed technique’s efficacy and reliability.