eng Science and Education Publishing Journal of Automation and Control 2372-3041 2017-08-28 5 1 25 36 10.12691/automation-5-1-5 AUTOMATION2017515 article D. K. Sambariya dsambariya_2003@yahoo.com 1 Rajendra Fagana 1 Department of Electrical Engineering, Rajasthan Technical University, Kota, India This paper presents a novel approach to design a PID controller for load frequency control (LFC) of a hydro-thermal power plant. In the modern power system, the load frequency control of hydro-thermal power plants has widely used in frequency control due to having the fast responses. The PID controller parameters are designed using the elephant herding optimization (EHO) as an optimization technique under the minimization of error. The objective function is considered as minimization of the Integral Squared Error (ISE) for optimal design of PID parameters of the system. The prototype of hydro-thermal power plant with PID controller is simulated in MATLAB/SIMULINK platform. The dynamic responses of load frequency control using proposed controller is compared with the responses of LFC without controller and the other method of frequency control of hydro-thermal power plant in literature. The effectiveness of the proposed methodology is better in terms of settling time, rise time, peak and peak time. http://pubs.sciepub.com/automation/5/1/5/automation-5-1-5.pdf load frequency control proportional integral derivative (PID) controller Thermal power plant hydro power plant elephant herding optimization (EHO)