Delay-Aware Wide-Area Control of Power Systems over Sparse Communications with Analytical Guarantees

Abstract

A distributed and sparse control strategy is proposed in this paper for wide-area power system networks. A network control design is proposed that makes use of the notion of communication sparsity and is delay-aware. Communication sparsity is imposed to reduce the cost of the network design, and the delay-aware aspect of the control design accommodates the fact that the sensor measurements utilized may stem from a local generator, generators within an area or those from another area. The latter is addressed using the same notion of sparsity but in a virtual sense by zeroing out the gains that correspond to measurements that are yet to arrive. Both sparsity features are introduced in the control design using the well-known Geromel algorithm. The designs are verified through a simulation study of the IEEE-39 bus, where it is shown that with 90% less communication channels, we can obtain 84% of the performance compared the case when neither of the two sparsity features is present. Index Terms: wide-area control, sparse communication, cyberphysical systems, delays