Controller Design of STATCOM for Power System Stability Improvement Using Honey Bee Mating Optimization

Damping of low frequency electromechanical oscillations is very important for a safe system operation. The fast acting, of a static synchronous compensator (STATCOM) which is capable of improving both steady state and dynamic performance permits newer approaches to system stabilization. This paper presents a novel methodology for tuning STATCOM based damping controller in order to enhance the damping of system low frequency oscillations. The design of STATCOM parameters are considered an optimization problem according to the time domain-based objective function solved by a Honey Bee Mating Optimization (HBMO) algorithm that has a strong ability to find the most optimistic results. To validate the results accuracy, a comparison with Genetic Algorithm (GA) has been made. The effectiveness of the proposed controller is demonstrated through nonlinear time-domain simulation and some performance indices studies over a wide range of loading conditions. The simulation study shows that the designed controller by HBMO performs better than GA in finding the solution. Moreover, the system performance analysis under different operating conditions shows that the phi based controller is superior to the C based controller.