Spiral-refraction mutation prairie dog algorithm: Optimization framework for engineering design of interconnected multimachine power system

Abstract

Many real-world engineering problems, characterized by high-dimensionality, nonlinearity, nonconvexity, and multi-modality, demand advanced optimization methods. Traditional algorithms may struggle with these challenges. Prairie dog optimization (PDO) was proposed for function optimization but faces limitations in balancing exploration and exploitation due to two reasons. The first one is related to diversity features which may not be efficient, and the second one is related to having no leading mechanism for direct search feature towards the promising regions. With that in mind, this study introduces an enhanced PDO variant, improved PDO (IPDO), addressing PDO's drawbacks through two key strategies: refraction-based learning (RBL) and spiral search learning (SSL). RBL enhances exploration by generating refraction solutions, while SSL conducts deep local searches around the best solution, strengthening exploitation. IPDO's performance is evaluated on benchmarks, IEEE CEC2017/CEC2020 test suites, and real-world constraint engineering optimization problems. Comparative analyses, including statistical measures, convergence analysis, and boxplot analysis, demonstrate IPDO's superiority. Besides, the IPDO is applied to estimate more promising parameters of power system stabilizer utilized in an interconnected multimachine power system using Western System Coordinating Council three-machine, ninebus power system. Results illustrate that the IPDO harvests the better estimation among the other methods, making it to be an efficient and powerful tool for dealing with the efficient operation of an interconnected multimachine power system which is a challenging real-world engineering problem.