Development of Fractional Order Controller for Load Frequency Control of Multi Area Interconnected Microgrid Power System

The integration of renewable energy sources into the grid affects the dynamic operation, as well as response of the power system-to-system disturbances in terms of change in power flow patterns and sensitivity of the system to faults. Thus minimising the frequency and tie-line power deviation within the accepted operating standard in multiple areas of interconnected power system is paramount. This work focused on the development of fractional order controllers for load frequency control of multi-area interconnected micro-grid power system. The fractional order proportional integral derivative (FOPID) controller was developed by replacing the integer order rate of the error at the input by its fractional order counterpart (μ). This was achieved by implementing an effective two area interconnected micro-gird power system with addition of renewable energy resources under the conditions of multiple disturbances and low system inertia. The gains of the developed controllers optimized using grasshopper optimization algorithm (GOA) and smell algorithm optimization (SAO) by minimizing integral absolute error (IAE), integral of square error (ISE), integral time absolute error (ITAE) and integral time squared error (ITSE) performance criterion.. In the minimum fitness values obtained from our simulation, the SAO optimized PID Controller has the best fitness value from ISE criterion from this research work. It outperformed the PID_GOA and FuzzyPID _GOA developed in (Lal et al., 2018) by 208% and 685% respectively.