This paper describes the application of Model Reference Adaptive Control (MRAC) for load frequency control (LFC) in multiarea power system. For LFCproblem, one of the MIMO adaptive control strategy called Decentralized Adaptive Control is used. In this scheme the output or the states of the generating unit are to track those of an explicitly specified reference model which is designed to have desirable performance characteristics. The adaptive control law is derived from Lyapunov stability criteria. A two area reheat thermal power system is considered to exemplify the potential of proposed approach. It is assumed that the system is subjected to bounded disturbance and is characterized by unknown but constant parameters which take values within a known bounded range. Conditions are determined under which the adaptive control law guarantees boundedness of controller parameters and ensures asymptotic stability of the tracking error between the system and the model. The results reported in this paper demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed controller over the fixed gain conventional controller.

Adaptive Load Frequency Control; MRAC; Lyapunov Stability; Multi Area Power Systems