Hierarchical Decentralized Control for Enhanced Rotor Angle and Voltage Stability of Large-Scale Power Systems

Several hierarchical centralized control schemes for either rotor angle or voltage stability improvement have been proposed in the literature. They all rely on exchanging information between different subsystems of a large-scale power system. By contrast, in this paper, we propose a hierarchical decentralized control scheme to enhance a unified manner rotor angle and voltage stability while using metered values collected within each subsystem, without any exchange of information between subsystems. Specifically, weakly coupled coherent areas of a power system are first determined. Then, secondary control agents are implemented in each of them to detect and damp rotor angle and voltage instabilities using local synchrophasor measurements. Decentralized control laws based on Lyapunov theory are implemented on FACTS devices for achieving global rotor angle asymptotic stability. Finally, a tertiary voltage control agent provides reference settings to the secondary voltage agents and takes control actions in case the latter fail to damp voltage instabilities. We show that the proposed scheme minimizes the communication bandwidth requirement while exhibiting a system-wide situational awareness. Simulations carried out on the IEEE 118-bus system demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed hierarchical decentralized control method.