This article deals with Automatic Generation Control (AGC) of a three-area power system having five diversified sources of generation like thermal unit, hydro unit, wind unit, diesel unit and a gas unit are interconnected together. Area-1 of the power system consists of a thermal, a hydro and a wind unit, area-2 has a thermal, a hydro and a diesel unit and area-3 consists of a thermal, a hydro and a gas unit. To make system more realistic different nonlinear components like governor dead band (GDB), generation rate constraint (GRC), Boiler dynamics and communication delay are taken into account. A novel two degree of freedom fractional order PID with derivative filter and fractional order PD with derivative filter (2-DOF-FOPIDN-FOPDN) cascaded control strategy is adopted to improve the dynamic performance of the power system. Results obtained with the proposed cascaded controller are compared with that of PID, FOPID and 2-DOF-PIDN-PDN cascaded controller to prove its superiority. To enumerate the gains of different controllers optimally, a recently developed bio-inspired optimisation algorithm named Selfish Herd Optimisation (SHO) is capitalised. Further, the work is extended by taking a two area hydro thermal system to compare the result of the SHO tuned PID controller with that of modern hybrid firefly algorithm-pattern search (hFA-PS) technique. Transient analysis is carried out by applying a sudden load disturbance of 0.01 p.u in area-1 and the robustness of the controller is examined by varying both system parameters and applying a randomly varying load in area-1. From the investigation it is concluded that the 2-DOF-FOPIDN-FOPDN controller gives a flawless and a distinct performance.
