Unified power flow controller based damping controller design: - A hybrid PSO-GSA approach

This paper demonstrates a novel approach for the design of Unified power flow controller (UPFC) based damping controller. A damping controller is universally adopted to reduce the low frequency of oscillation in a power system. Finding the controller parameters is considered to be an optimization problem. The estimation of optimum values for a damping controller requires strong and efficient optimization methods. A hybrid algorithm which combines the concept of Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) and Gravitational Search Algorithm (GSA) termed as hybrid PSOGSA (hPSO-GSA) is used to tune the parameters of the FACT based damping controller. The objective of this algorithm is to integrate the exploitation property of PSO with the exploration property of GSA. The main focus here is, how the system stability can be improved by the optimal settings of the variables of a damping controller that can be obtained by using the hybrid algorithm. In this proposed work, the comparison of the hPSO-GSA algorithm with the GSA and PSO algorithm for the design of UPFC based damping controller is also carried out. The simulation results presented here concludes that the controller design using the proposed hPSO-GSA provides better solutions as compared to other methods.