Active Disturbance Rejection Control in fully distributed Automatic Generation Control with co-simulation of communication delay

This paper compares Active Disturbance Rejection Control (ADRC), Proportional-Integral (PI) and ultra-local adaptive controller (also labeled intelligent-PID) when applied to Automatic Generation Control (AGC) for a multi-area power system with co-simulation of the communication system. The co-simulation platform PiccSIM integrates Simulink/Matlab and Network Simulator Ver. 2 (NS2) with real-time simulation data exchanged through Local Area Network (LAN). Instead of the traditional control center, automatic generation controller is embedded in each participating generation unit locally to avoid communication delay for the control signals. This new control scheme is referred to as fully distributed AGC. The performance of the proposed scheme is tested on a nonlinear model of New England (NE) 39-bus system with the co-simulated tie-line power flow communication delays. The simulation results present very promising performance and good robustness of ADRC in the presence of communication delays, suggesting that the stability of the overall cyber-physical system is enhanced significantly.