Design of Wide-Area Damping Controllers Incorporating Resiliency to Permanent Failure of Remote Communication Links

The synchrophasor data provided by wide-area measurement systems have potential applications in electric power systems such as the use of these measurements as control inputs of wide-area damping controllers (WADCs) for small-signal stability enhancement. However, synchrophasor data are particularly vulnerable to cyber attacks (such as denial-of-service attacks) that can cause communication link failures in a smart grid communication network and, consequently, compromise the power system stability. In order to reduce the impact of communication failures on the performance of a WADC, this paper proposes a method to design a WADC considering robustness to multiple operating points, time delays in the communication channels and possible permanent loss of communication signals in the input and the output of the controller (which may be due, e.g., to denial-of-service cyber attacks). The performance of the designed controller is evaluated using modal analysis and nonlinear time-domain simulations in one of the IEEE benchmark systems to validate the results: the Simplified 14-Generator Model of the Southeastern Australian Power System. © 2018, Brazilian Society for Automatics--SBA.