Parallel PBIL applied to power system controller design

Population-Based Incremental Learning (PBIL) algorithm is a combination of evolutionary optimization and competitive learning derived from artificial neural networks. PBIL has recently received increasing attention in various engineering fields due to its effectiveness, easy implementation and robustness. Despite these strengths, it was reported in the last few years that PBIL suffers from issues of loss of diversity in the population. To deal with this shortcoming, this paper uses parallel PBIL based on multi-population. In parallel PBIL, two populations are used where both probability vectors (PVs) are initialized to 0.5. It is believed that by introducing two populations, the diversity in the population can be increased and better results can be obtained. The approach is applied to power system controller design. Simulations results show that the parallel PBIL approach performs better than the standard PBIL and is as effective as another diversity increasing PBIL called adaptive PBIL.