Due to the interaction of electric multiple units (EMUs), and the electric traction networks, low frequency oscillations (LFOs) appear leading to traction blockade and overall
stability related issues. For suppressing LFOs, coronavirus herd immunity optimiser
(CHIO), a recently developed meta‐heuristic, has been applied for tuning controller
parameters. Controller parameters are tuned to minimise the integral time absolute error
(ITAE) that regulates DC‐link capacitor voltage. Results obtained using CHIO are
compared with those found using other well‐established algorithms like symbiotic organisms search (SOS) and particle swarm optimisation (PSO). The supremacy of CHIO
over other mentioned algorithms for mitigating LFOs was demonstrated for a diverse
range of operating conditions. Results demonstrates that overshoot for the proposed
algorithm‐based traction unit is 1.0061% whereas those for SOS and PSO based algorithm are obtained as 6.4542 % and 20.6166%, respectively which are quite high. CHIO is
more stable than SOS and PSO and requires settling time of 0.1934 s only to reach
steady‐state condition, which is 50.21% faster than SOS and 65.03% faster than PSO.
Also, the total harmonic distortion (THD) for line currents of the secondary side of
traction transformer (TT) are obtained as 0.88%, 2.17%, and 12.48% for CHIO, SOS, and
PSO, respectively.