A Data-driven Approach for the Design of Wide-Area Damping Controllers

The growing complexity of interconnected power systems, with significant penetration of intermittent renewable sources, makes the tasks of devising power system models and defining the operating point challenging. In this context, the large amount of data available from wide-area monitoring systems (WAMS) encourages the application of data-driven methods to power system stability and control. In the present work, a data-driven control design method, called Virtual Reference Feedback Tuning (VRFT), is formulated to design oscillation damping controllers for power systems using remote input signals from phasor measurement units (PMU). The only requirement is a reference model for the closed-loop dynamics. A strategy is proposed to build such model, based on the characteristics of the inter-area mode and measured output response. The use of remote signals in a wide-area damping controller (WADC) approach leads to very efficient inter-area damping controllers. Also, the fast-solving characteristic of the method is explored in an online implementation, where a previously designed controller is re-tuned to re-establish the damping performance after a change in operating condition. The proposed method is tested with two IEEE benchmark power systems, with one having a high penetration of Inverter-Based Source (IBS) generation. In both cases, the critical inter-area oscillation mode is successfully damped.