Design of a Decentralized Wide-Area Damping Controller to Tolerate Permanent Communication Failures

Damping controllers that use data from Phasor Measurement Units (PMUs) such as Wide-Area Damping Controllers (WADCs) are effective in damping power system oscillation modes, especially inter-area modes. However, communication failures or cyber attacks on the WADC channels can compromise its operation. This work presents a new method of designing a decentralized WADC capable of increasing the damping ratios of the closed-loop control system modes and ensuring the stability of the system in case a communication failure occurs in the data transmission of PMUs throughout the operation of the WADC. The new design procedure is based on a new optimization model and two different metaheuristics from the area of swarm intelligence are applied and evaluated separately: Crow Search Algorithm and Particle Swarm Optimization. The IEEE 68-bus sistem is used as a test system for the analysis of the proposed method through a set of studies of both modal analyzes and time domain analyzes under contingencies. The obtained results show a good performance of the closed-loop control system with a simpler control structure and with few parameters to be tuned by the proposed method. Furthermore, the different metaheuristics evaluated presented relatively different performances in terms of control objectives.