Artificial Bee Colony (ABC) has recently been
explored to develop a novel algorithm for distributed optimization
and control. This paper proposes an ABC-based Load Frequency
Control (LFC) design to enhance the damping of oscillations in a
two-area power system. A two-area non-reheat thermal system is
considered to be equipped with proportional plus integral (PI)
controllers. The proposed design problem is formulated as an
optimization problem. ABC is utilized to search for optimal
controller parameters by minimizing a time-domain based
objective function. The performance of the proposed controller
has been evaluated with the performance of the conventional PI
controller, and PI controller tuned by genetic algorithm (GA)
in order to demonstrate the superior efficiency of the proposed
ABC in tuning PI controller. Simulation results emphasis on the
better performance of the optimized PI controller based on ABC
in compare to optimized PI controller based on GA and
conventional one over wide range of operating conditions, and
system parameters variations.