Design and performance analysis of elephant herding optimization based controller for load frequency control in thermal interconnected power system

In this present contribution, an attempt has been taken to design and analyze the performance of elephant herding optimization (EHO) based controller for load frequency control (LFC) applications of interconnected power system. The studied system is a two‐area nonreheat thermal interconnected system which is widely used in literature. A proportional‐integral‐differential controller is utilized for LFC of the studied system. EHO technique is applied to obtain the tuned set of controller parameters. The objectives considered for design of the controller are the minimization of settling times and integral‐time‐multiplied‐absolute‐error of frequency deviations (FDs) and tie‐line power deviation (TPD). The design objectives are integrated together to form a function with single objective by assigning equal weights after normalization. Several test cases of diverse set of disturbances are taken into account to test the performance of the proposed controller and the obtained results are compared with other controllers designed with differential evolution, gray wolf optimization, particle swarm optimization, teacher‐learner‐based optimization, and whale optimization algorithm. Furthermore, the time‐domain simulations of FDs and TPD are illustrated to support the tabulated results. In addition, comparative statistical analysis is presented to validate the robust behavior of the proposed controller.