Load frequency active disturbance rejection control for multi-source power system based on soft actor-critic

To ensure the safe operation of an interconnected power system, it is necessary to maintain the stability of the frequency and the tie-line exchanged power. This is one of the hottest issues in the power system field and is usually called load frequency control. To overcome the influences of load disturbances on multi-source power systems containing thermal power plants, hydropower plants, and gas turbine plants, we design a linear active disturbance rejection control (LADRC) based on the tie-line bias control mode. For LADRC, the parameter selection of the controller directly affects the response performance of the entire system, and it is usually not feasible to manually adjust parameters. Therefore, to obtain the optimal controller parameters, we use the Soft ActorCritic algorithm in reinforcement learning to obtain the controller parameters in real time, and we design the reward function according to the needs of the power system. We carry out simulation experiments to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method. Compared with the results of other proportional–integral–derivative control techniques using optimization algorithms and LADRC with constant parameters, the proposed method shows significant advantages in terms of overshoot, undershoot, and settling time. In addition, by adding different disturbances to different areas of the multi-source power system, we demonstrate the robustness of the proposed control strategy.