Abstract

The load frequency control (LFC) problem has been one of the major subjects in electric power system design and operation. LFC is becoming much more significant today in accordance with increasing size, changing structure and complexity in interconnected power systems. Practice LFC systems use simple proportional-integral (PI) controllers, but parameters of PI controllers are usually tuned based on the trial-and-error approaches and they are incapable to obtain good dynamic performance under a wide range of operating conditions. For this problem, in this paper quantitative feedback theory (QFT) method is used for LFC problem. A multi-area electric power system with a wide range of parametric uncertainties is given to illustrate proposed method. To show effectiveness of proposed method, a classical PI type controller optimized by genetic algorithms (GA) is designed to compare with QFT controller. The simulation results visibly show the validity of QFT method in comparison with traditional method.

Key words: Multi-area electric power system, electric power system load frequency control, robust control, quantitative feedback theory method.