Comparison between Three Metaheuristics Applied to Robust Power System Stabilizer Design

This paper presents a PSS (Power System Stabilizer) design using Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO), Genetic Algorithms (GA) and Simulated Annealing (SA) methods. The design is considered for multimachine power systems. The main motivation for this design is to damp electromechanical oscillations and stabilize low-frequency oscillations of power systems. The lead-lag PSS parameters are tuned by formulating an optimization problem which is solved by these three meta-heuristic techniques, to reach optimal global stability. This approach has been applied to the WSCC (Western System Coordinating Council), which is a three-machine nine-bus system has, to design optimal PSSs for different operating conditions and disturbances and different loads. A comparison between the three techniques, in terms of performance and calculation time consumption, is carried out through simulation results.