A Delay-Aware Cyber-Physical Architecture for Wide-Area Control of Power Systems

Abstract

In this paper we address the problem of widearea control of power systems in presence of different classes of network delays. We pose the control objective as an LQR minimization of the electro-mechanical states of the swing equations, and exploit flexibilities and transparencies of the communication network such as scheduling policies, bandwidth to co-design a delay-aware state feedback control law. Hence, unlike the traditional robust control designs, our design is delayaware, not delay-tolerant. A key feature of our method is to retain the samples of the control input until a desired time instant using shapers before releasing them for actuation to regulate the delays entering the controller. In addition, our codesign includes an overrun management strategy to guarantee stability of the closed-loop power system model in case of occasional PMU data losses. This strategy allows dropping messages with very large delays, reducing resource utilization during busy network times, and improving overall performance of the system. We illustrate our results using a 50-bus, 14- generator, 4-area power system model, and show how the proposed arbitrated controller can guarantee significantly better closed-loop performance than traditional robust controllers.