Design of wide-area damping controllers based on networked predictive control considering communication delays

This paper presents a wide-area damping controller (WADC) based on networked predictive control (NPC), of which the main purpose is to eliminate the impact of the communication delays of the wide-area signals from the wide-area measurement system (WAMS). The proposed WADC incorporates a generalized predictive control (GPC) to generate the optimized future control sequences and a network delay compensator (NDC) to compensate the communication delays actively. A recursive least-squares algorithm (RLSA) with a variable forgetting factor is used to identify the predictive model in order to overcome the effect of the model inaccuracy of the large-scale power system. Simulation studies undertaken on a two-area four-machine power system show that the proposed WADC can damp the inter-area mode oscillations effectively and compensate the communication delays existing in the wide-area signals in an active way. Moreover, the results obtained in the comparison with the WADC based on GPC are also provided.