Load Frequency Control of Multi-area Power System
Using DE algorithm based PIDF Controller and RFB
*Tulasichandra Sekhar Gorripotu, Rabindra Kumar Sahu, Sidhartha Panda
Department of Electrical Engineering
Veer Surendra Sai University of Technology (VSSUT), Burla-768018, Odisha, India
E-mails: *gtchsekhar@gmail.com, rksahu123@gmail.com, panda_sidhartha@rediffmail.com
Abstract— This paper presents the simulation of multi area
multi source interconnected power system for Load Frequency
Control (LFC). Initially, a multi area reheat thermal power
system with the consideration of non-linearities such as Time
Delay (TD), Governor Dead Band (GDB) and Generation Rate
Constraint (GRC) are considered. PID controller with derivative
filter (PIDF) is evaluated to solve the LFC problem. The gains of
the PIDF controller are optimized using an Integral of Time
multiplied by Absolute value of Error (ITAE) criterion
employing of Differential Evolution (DE) algorithm. Finally,
Redox Flow Batteries (RFB) are considered in both the areas to
improve the performance of the system and simulation results
also reveals that RFB coordinated system enhances the stability
of the system.
Keywords:- Load Frequency Control (LFC), Time Delay (TD),
Governor Dead Band (GDB), Generation Rate Constraint (GRC),
Differential Evolution (DE), Redox Flow Battery (RFB).
I. INTRODUCTION
In an interconnected power system, a sudden load
perturbation (SLP) in any area causes the deviation of
frequencies of all the areas and also in the tie-line powers.
This has to be corrected to ensure the generation and
distribution of electric power with good quality. This is
achieved by load frequency control (LFC) also known as
Automatic Generation Control (AGC) [1]. Load frequency
control, as the name signifies, is used to regulate the power
flow between different areas while holding the frequency
constant. The supply frequency may drop if there is an
increase in the load. LFC is one of the important control
problems in interconnected power system design and
operation, and is becoming more significant today due to the
increasing size, changing structure, emerging renewable
energy sources and new uncertainties, environmental
constraints, and complexity of power systems.
To solve this problem, fast acting energy storage
systems are essential. The energy storage systems like
Superconducting Magnetic Energy Storage (SMES), Battery
Energy Storage (BES) and Redox Flow Battery (RFB) are
capable of meet over loads and also improve transient
response of the system. In the recent past, some researchers
are worked on SMES for LFC problem. But, Rechargeable
batteries such as RFB are equivalent to SMES and gaining
momentum in research due to their fast and outstanding
performance[2-3]. Recently, Parmar et al. have presented [4]
the Load frequency control (LFC) of a multi-source power
system with Redox flow batteries (RFB). They have studied
only single area system with diverse sources. However, they
have not considered important physical constraints such as
Governor Dead Band (GDB), Generation rate constraint (GRC)
and Time delay (TD). Francis et al. have studied [5] load
frequency control of a two area reheat interconnected power
system considering governor dead band nonlinearity only.
Therefore, this paper presents a comprehensive study on
dynamic performance of an interconnected power system by
considering reheat thermal systems physical constraints such
as GDB, GRC and TD coordinated with RFB.
II. MATERIAL AND METHOD
A. Power System Under Study
The study has been carried out on a two control areas
having equal power capacity of 2000MW and nominal loading
as 1640MW. A two area multi unit interconnected power
system has been proposed for LFC with GDB, GRC and time
delay as shown in Fig. 1. Area 1 comprises of two GENCOs
with thermal power system of reheat turbine and GRC
combinations and area 2 comprises of two GENCOs with
thermal power system of reheat turbine and GRC combination
shown in Fig. 1. A PIDF controller is considered for each area.
In Fig.1, R1, R2, R3 and R4 are the regulation parameters of
thermal units for area 1and area 2 respectively in pu Hz. B1
and B2 represent the frequency bias parameters. Tg1 and Tg 2
are the speed governor time constants in sec for area 1; Tg 3
and Tg 4 are the speed governor time constants in sec for area
2; Tt1 and Tt 2 are the turbine time constant in sec for area 1;
Tt 3 and Tt 4 are the turbine time constant in sec for area 2;
PD1 and PD 2 are the load demand changes in p.u.; K Ps1
and K Ps 2 stands for the power system gains; TPs1 and TPs2
represent the power system time constants in sec; T12 is the
synchronizing coefficient and F1 and F2 are the system
frequency deviations in Hz. PID controller with derivative
filter coefficient (PIDF) is considered for each area. In the
present study, a GRC of 3%/ min, GDB of 0.036 Hz and a
time delay of 50 ms are considered [6-7]. The relevant
parameters are given in appendix.
 AREA1
1 1
R2 R1 PD1
B1 K RFB
ACE1
TRFB s  1
 
K r1Tr1s  1
apf11  GDB
1

1 1 
 T g1s  1 Tt1 Tr1s  1 F1
 s


PIDF K ps1
Controller TD
Thermal Reheat System1 with GDB & GRC  T ps1s  1
 ACE 1 
1

K r 2Tr 2 s  1

1 1
apf12  GDB Tg 2 s  1  Tr 2 s  1 
 Tt 2 s


Thermal Reheat System2 with GDB & GRC 2T12

s
 PTie 
a 12 a 12
AREA2


 1 1 1 K r 3Tr 3s  1
apf 21  GDB Tg 3s  1  Tt 3 Tr 3s  1 
 s
F2
 

PIDF
TD

Controller K ps 2

Thermal Reheat System3 with GDB & GRC  T ps 2 s  1
ACE 2
 
1 1 1 K r 4Tr 4 s  1 
B2 apf 22  GDB Tg 4 s  1  Tt 4 s Tr 4 s  1

 
Thermal Reheat System4 with GDB & GRC

1 1 ACE 2
K RFB
PD 2
TRFB s  1
R3 R4

Fig. 1. MATLAB/SIMULINK model of multi-area multi-unit interconnected power system

turn increases speed of the controller response. However,

B. Control Structure and Objective Function
To control the frequency, PIDF controllers are provided
in each area. The error inputs to the controllers are the
respective area control errors (ACE) given by:
e1(t )  ACE1  B1F1  PTie (1)
e2 (t )  ACE2  B2F2  PTie
The proportional integral derivative controller (PID) is the
most popular feedback controller used in the process
industries. It is a robust, easily understood controller that can
provide excellent control performance despite the varied
dynamic characteristics of process plant. PID controllers are
used when stability and fast response are required. Derivative
mode improves stability of the system and enables increase
in proportional gain and decrease in integral gain which in
when the input signal has sharp corners, the derivative term
will produce unreasonable size control inputs to the plant.
Also, any noise in the control input signal will result in large
plant input signals. These reasons often lead to complications
in practical applications. The practical solution to the these
(2) problems is to put a first filter on the derivative term and tune
its pole so that the chattering due to the noise does not occur
since it attenuates high frequency noise. In view of the above
a filter is used for the derivative term in the present paper.
In the design of a modern heuristic optimization
technique based controller, the objective function is first
defined based on the desired specifications and constraints.
 TABLE II
Generating Unit Load TUNED PIDF CONTROLLER PARAMETERS FOR DIFFERENT CASES

Charging Discharging Without

Controller With RFB
RFB
parameters
Dual converter with
Battery Energy Storage System KP1 0.2533 -0.6646
KI1 -1.3495 -1.9898
KD1 -1.9184 0.0690
Fig. 2. General block diagram of redox flow batteries in LFC
N1 10.9493 85.0698
Performance criteria usually considered in the control design KP2 -1.1175 -1.1311
KI2 -0.4014 -1.9736
are the Integral of Time multiplied Absolute Error (ITAE),
KD2 -0.3069 0.5979
Integral of Squared Error (ISE), Integral of Time multiplied N2 23.0094 249.9535
Squared Error (ITSE) and Integral of Absolute Error (IAE).
ITAE criterion reduces the settling time which cannot be
achieved with IAE or ISE based tuning. ITAE criterion also TABLE II
PERFORMANCE INDEX VALUES
reduces the peak overshoot. ITSE based controller provides
large controller output for a sudden change in set point which Peak over shoot (p.u. )x10-2
Cases
ITAE
is not advantageous from controller design point of view. It ΔF1 ΔF2 ΔPTie
has been reported that ITAE is a better objective function in Without RFB 16.88 16.22 2.62 8.59
LFC studies [8]. Therefore, in this paper ITAE is used as With RFB 0.27 0.27 0.02 0.913
objective function to optimize parameters of PIDF controller.
Expression for the ITAE objective function is depicted in Eq.
(3). 0.2
t sim
 F1  F2  PTie  t  dt
Without RFB
J  ITAE   (3) 0.15 With RFB
0 0.1
Where, F1 and F2 are the system frequency deviations;
0.05
PTie is the incremental change in tie line power; t sim is the
F1 (Hz)

0
time range of simulation.
-0.05

-0.1
C. Modelling of RFB in LFC
-0.15
In an interconnected power system during the
-0.2
presence of small load perturbations and with optimized
controller gains, the frequency deviations and tie-line power -0.25
0 5 10 15 20 25 30
changes exist for long time durations. During such conditions Time (sec)
the governor may not able to absorb the frequency deviations
Fig. 3. Frequency Deviation of Area1
due to slow response and non-linearities present in the system.
So, in order to reduce the frequency deviations and change in 0.2
tie-line power, an active power source with quick response Without RFB
0.15 With RFB
such as RFB can be expected to the most effective one. The
RFB are found to be superior over the other energy storage 0.1

devices like superconducting magnetic energy storage (SMES) 0.05

because of its easy operating at normal temperature, very
F2 (Hz)

0
small losses during operating conditions and have long service
life [4,5,10]. A general block diagram of the RFB used for -0.05

LFC in the interconnected power system is shown in the Fig. 2. -0.1

During very low load duration battery charges and delivers the
-0.15
energy to the system during sudden load changes. The dual
converter performs both rectifier and inverter action. For -0.2
sudden step load perturbation the change of output of a RFB is -0.25
given as [4] 0 5 10 15 20 25 30
Time (sec)
K RFB
PRFB  ACEi (4) Fig. 4. Frequency Deviation of Area2
1  sTRFB
 0.03
0.025
0.02
PTie (p.u)
0.015
0.01
0.005
0 Rated frequency = 60Hz, Rating of each area = 2000 MW,
-0.005
0 3 6 9
Time (sec)
Fig. 5. Tie-line Power Deviation
III. SIMULATION RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
The block diagram of multi area multi-source power system
is shown in the Fig. 1. In the initial move, different PIDF
controllers are considered without RFB. The gains of PIDF
controller are optimized by employing DE algorithm [9]. In
the present study, a population size of NP=100, generation
number G=100, step size F=0.8 and crossover probability of
CR =0.8 have been used. The range of gains of PIDF
controller KP1, KP2, KI1, KI2, KD1, KD2 are taken as [-2, 2], filter
coefficient N as [10, 300], population of size N P=50 and it was
repeated for 50 number of iterations. The corresponding
optimum values of the system are given in Table I. The
objective function (ITAE) value given by Eq. (3) is
determined by simulating the developed model by applying a
5% step load disturbance in both areas. The corresponding
performance index in terms of ITAE value is shown in Table
II. In the next step, Redox Flow Batteries (RFB) are
considered in both the areas which are connected to
corresponding Area Control Errors (ACEs). The same
procedure has to be followed as mentioned above. The
optimized gain values are given in Table I and the
performance index values such as setting time (2% tolerance
band), peak over shoot and objective function ITAE are given
in Table II. From Table II it is clear that the ITAE value is
reduced to 0.913 from 8.59 and all the performance index
values are improved when the system is coordinated with RFB.
The dynamic responses of the system in both the cases are
shown in the Figs. 3-5. From Figs. 3-5 it reveals that, the
response of the system is improved when it is coordinated
with redox flow battery.
IV. CONCLUSION
In this paper, a novel PID with derivative filter
controller has been proposed for load frequency control (LFC)
of two area four reheat thermal power system. The physical
constraints such as Time Delay (TD), Governor Dead Band
(GDB) and Generation Rate Constraint (GRC) are considered
to demonstrate the ability of the proposed approach to handle
nonlinearity in the system model and the effectiveness of
Redox Flow Battery (RFB) in Load Frequency Problem (LFC)
problem has demonstrated. The gains of PIDF controllers in
Without RFB
With RFB
both cases without RFB and with RFB are optimized by
Differential Evolution (DE) algorithm. From the simulation
results, it is observed that significant improvements of
dynamic performance of the system are obtained when the
system is incorporated with RFB.
APPENDIX
Nominal Parameters of the Power System
Base power = 2000 MVA, R1 = R2 = R3 = R4 =2.4
12 15 Hz/p.u.MW, B1 =B2 = 0.425 p.u.MW/Hz, Tg1 = Tg2 = Tg3 =
Tg4 = 0.08sec, Tr1 =Tr2 = Tr3 = Tr4 = 10sec, Tt1 = Tt2 = Tt3 = Tt4
= 0.3 sec, Kps1 = Kps2 = 120 Hz/p.u. MW, T ps1 = Tps2 = 20sec,
Kr1 = Kr2 = Kr3 = Kr4 =0.5; a12 = -1, 2πT12 = 0.545 p.u.MW/Hz.
Data for RFB [5]: KRFB =1.8; TRFB = 0sec.
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