Optimal design of power system stabilizer in a multi-machine system using GSO approach

Accurate damping of inter-area and intra area oscillations are very much critical in the stability of electric power system. Power system stabilizer (PSS) is mainly used as auxiliary controllers to damp out the low frequency oscillations in the area of electric power system. The tuning of Conventional Power System Stabilizer (CPSS) for a nonlinear power system should be robust such that overall system stability can be improved under several operating points. Today's scenario, various populations based heuristic algorithms are available to minimize the effect of stability problem by properly tuning the parameters of CPSS. In this paper presents a new heuristic population based optimization technique named as Group Search Optimization (GSO) algorithm to tune the PSS parameters for a multi-machine system for different operating conditions. The importance of the GSO algorithm is evaluated and compared for damping the system oscillations during small and large disturbances, and their robustness is illustrated using the transient signal analysis.