PSS and TCSC damping controller coordinated design using PSO in multi-machine power system

The paper develops a new design procedure for simultaneous coordinated designing of the thyristor controlled series capacitor (TCSC) damping controller and power system stabilizer (PSS) in multi-machine power system. The coordinated design problem of PSS and TCSC damping controllers over a wide range of loading conditions is converted to an optimization problem with the time domain-based objective function that is solved by a particle swarm optimization (PSO) technique which has a strong ability to find the most optimistic results. By minimizing the proposed fitness function in which oscillatory characteristics between areas are included and thus the interactions among the TCSC controller and PSS under transient conditions in the multi-machine power system are improved. To ensure the robustness of the proposed stabilizers, the design process takes a wide range of operating conditions into account. The effectiveness of the proposed controller is demonstrated through the nonlinear time-domain simulation and some performance indices studies. The results of these studies show that the proposed coordinated controllers have an excellent capability in damping power system inter-area oscillations and enhance greatly the dynamic stability of the power system. Moreover, it is superior to both the uncoordinated designed stabilizers of the PSS and the TCSC damping controller. (C) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.