An Optimization Approach for the Wide-Area Damping Control Design

Wide-Area Damping Controllers (WADCs) or Centralized damping controllers of electromechanical oscillations based on synchronized phasor measurements can have many input-output channels for its operation. However, cyber attacks such as denial-of-service may damage the information package sent to the control center and compromise the performance of the centralized controller. This paper presents a procedure based on Particle Swarm Optimization for the centralized control design minimizing the number of input-output signals and maximizing the closed loop power system damping. With a reduced number of communication channels, the control center can focus its security system on a few channels. Time delay models are incorporated in the design stage using the second-order Pade approximation. To evaluate the efficacy of the proposed procedure and the resulting controller, modal analysis and time-domain nonlinear simulations were carried out in the IEEE 39-bus power system considering multiple operating conditions.