Sparse and optimal wide-area damping control in power networks

Inter-area oscillations in power networks are typically poorly controllable by means of local decentralized control. Recent research efforts have been aimed at developing wide-area control strategies that involve communication of remote signals. In conventional wide-area control strategies the control structure is fixed a priori typically based on modal criteria. In contrast, here we employ the recently introduced paradigm of sparsity-promoting optimal control to simultaneously identify the control structure and optimize the closed-loop performance. To induce a sparse control architecture, we regularize the standard quadratic performance index with an ℓ₁-penalty on the feedback matrix. The quadratic objective functions are inspired by the classic slow coherency theory and are aimed at imitating homogeneous networks without inter-area oscillations. We use a compelling example to demonstrate that the proposed combination of the sparsity-promoting optimal control design with the slow coherency objective functions performs almost as well as the optimal centralized controllers.