A Method Based on Linear Matrix Inequalities to Design a Wide-Area Damping Controller Resilient to Permanent Communication Failures

Abstract

One of the main advantages of the wide-area measurement systems in the small-signal stability of the electric power systems is to use synchrophasor data from the phasor measurement units (PMUs) for the operation of a central controller, or wide-area damping controller (WADC), to improve the damping ratio of the low-frequency oscillation modes. However, cyber-attacks in the PMU measurements can lead to permanent communication failure of the WADC channels and, therefore, the dynamic performance of the power system can be damaged. Besides, the signals for this controller are from different locations and thus they present time delays that can also damage the power system dynamic performance. This article introduces a method based on linear matrix inequalities to design a WADC robust to power system operation uncertainties, time-delay uncertainties, and permanent communication failure of the WADC channels. The proposed method was applied and evaluated in the IEEE 68-bus system by modal analysis and time-domain nonlinear simulations.