Inter-Area Oscillation Damping in Large-Scale Power Systems Using Decentralized Control

Inter-area oscillation is one of the main concerns in power system small signal stability. It involves wide area in power system, therefore identifying the causes and damping these oscillations are challenging. Undamped inter-area oscillations may cause severe problems in power systems including large-scale blackouts. Designing a proper controller for power systems also is a challenging problem due to the complexity of the system. Moreover, for a large-scale system it is impractical to collect all system information in one location to design a centralized controller. Decentralized controller will be more desirable for large scale systems to minimize the inter area oscillations by using local information. In this paper, we consider a large-scale power system consisting of three areas. After decomposing the system into three subsystems, each subsystem is modeled with a lower order system. Finally, a decentralized controller is designed for each subsystem to maintain the large-scale system frequency at the desired level even in the presence of disturbances.