Recently, honey bee mating optimization (HBMO) technique and genetic algorithms (GA) have attracted considerable
attention among various modern heuristic optimization techniques. This paper presents the application and performance
comparison of HBMO and GA optimization techniques, for coordinated design of STATCOM and PSS. The design objective
is to enhance damping of the low frequency oscillations. The design problem of the controller is formulated as an optimization
problem and both HBMO and GA optimization techniques are employed to search for optimal controller parameters. The
performance of both optimization techniques for damping low frequency oscillations are tested and demonstrated through
nonlinear time-domain simulation and some performance indices studies to different disturbances over a wide range of
loading conditions. The results show that the designed controller by HBMO performs better than GA in finding the solution.
Moreover, the system performance analysis under different operating conditions show that the ϕ based controller is superior
to the C based controller.