Artificial Bee Colony Algorithm for Multimachine Power System Stabilizer Design

Artificial Bee Colony (ABC) algorithm is being widely used for global optimization problems. In this paper, an ABC algorithm is presented for optimal design of multimachine Power System Stabilizers (PSSs). This novel optimization method, inspired by the intelligent behavior of honey bee swarms, is characterized as efficient in computation as well as simple in concept. It also uses less control parameters compared to other metaheuristic approaches. The performance of the proposed ABC based-PSS design is validated for a multimachine power system: 16-machine 68 -bus system. Eigenvalue analysis and nonlinear system simulations demonstrate that the optimization by ABC algorithm outperforms genetic algorithms in enhancing the system dynamic stability.