Exponential PID controller for effective load frequency regulation of electric power systems

Load frequency regulation (LFR) is an indispensable scheme in planning electrical power production to provide consumers with stable, reliable and uninterrupted power. In the face of complicated power system (PS) structures with increasing and intricate power demand, new controllers that offer not only good performance, but also easy commissioning in practice are required. To this end, this research introduces an exponential PID (EXP-PID) controller as a new control scheme to ameliorate the LFR performance of PSs. This controller is simple to design and has a nonlinear feature inherited from two tunable exponential functions, which are placed in front of the PID controller and act on the error signal and its time derivative individually. To achieve the utmost performance, the EXP-PID controller’s parameters are procured by a corrected variant of the snake optimizer (co-SO). To validate the proposed control scheme, various single-/multi-area single-/multi-source PSs favored in the area are considered as test benches. A thorough comparison with the state-of-the-art approaches is performed to disclose the true efficacy of our proposal. Among the rivals, co-SO tuned EXP-PID controller, despite its simplicity, is found to render credible and promising performance in mitigating frequency and tie-line power deviations effectively.