IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CONTROL SYSTEMS TECHNOLOGY, VOL. 23, NO.
1, JANUARY 2015
Wide-Area Damping Controller for Power System
Interarea Oscillations: A Networked
Predictive Control Approach
Wei Yao, Member, IEEE, Lin Jiang, Member, IEEE, Jinyu Wen, Member, IEEE,
Qinghua Wu, Fellow, IEEE, and Shijie Cheng, Fellow, IEEE
Abstract Wide-area damping controller (WADC) requires
communication networks to transmit remote signals. The usage
of communication networks will introduce time delays into the
control loop of the WADC. Ignoring this time delay would
deteriorate the damping performance provided by the WADC
or even cause the whole system instability. This paper employs
networked predictive control (NPC) to design a WADC for
the generator exciter to enhance the damping of interarea
oscillations in a large-scale power system. The NPC incorporates
with a generalized predictive control (GPC) to generate optimal
control predictions, and a network delay compensator to detect
and compensate both constant and random delays. Moreover,
model identification is used to obtain an equivalent reduced-
order model of the large-scale power system and deal with
the model uncertainties and variation of operating conditions.
Case studies are based on the New England 10-machine 39-bus
system. Effectiveness of the proposed WADC is verified by
simulation studies and compared with a conventional WADC and
a GPC-based WADC without delay compensation.
Index Terms Delay compensation, interarea oscillations,
model identification, networked predictive control (NPC),
wide-area damping controller (WADC).
I. I NTRODUCTION
A S ONE of the main concerns of a power system small
signal stability, interarea oscillations greatly influence the
reliable and economical operation of the large-scale intercon-
nected power systems because they would limit the available
Manuscript received August 9, 2013; revised December 5, 2013; accepted
February 25, 2014. Date of publication March 31, 2014; date of current version
December 15, 2014. Manuscript received in final form March 12, 2014. This
work was supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation
of China under Grant 51207063, in part by the National High Technology
Research and Development of China under Grant 2011AA05A119, and in
part by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council of U.K.
under Grant EP/J014249/1. Recommended by Associate Editor P. Korba.
W. Yao is with the State Key Laboratory of Advanced Electromagnetic Engi-
neering and Technology, Huazhong University of Science and Technology,
Wuhan 430074, China, and also with the Department of Electrical Engineering
and Electronics, The University of Liverpool, Liverpool L69 3GJ, U.K.
(e-mail: w.yao@hust.edu.cn).
L. Jiang and Q. H. Wu are with the Department of Electrical Engineering
and Electronics, The University of Liverpool, Liverpool L69 3GJ, U.K.
(e-mail: ljiang@liv.ac.uk; qhwu@liv.ac.uk).
J. Wen and S. Cheng are with the State Key Laboratory of Advanced
Electromagnetic Engineering and Technology, Huazhong University of Sci-
ence and Technology, Wuhan 430074, China (e-mail: jinyu.wen@hust.edu.cn;
sjcheng@hust.edu.cn).
Color versions of one or more of the figures in this paper are available
online at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TCST.2014.2311852
1063-6536 2014 IEEE. Personal use is permitted, but republication/redistribution requires IEEE permission.
See http://www.ieee.org/publications_standards/publications/rights/index.html for more information.
27
transfer capability (ATC) of the tie-lines between different
power control areas [1], [2]. The interarea oscillations often
suffer from poor damping since power systems generally
operate closely to their maximum ATC under deregulated
electricity market environment [3]. Therefore, they should be
effectively damped. Traditionally, they are damped together
with the local mode oscillations by tuning power system
stabilizers (PSSs) installed on the excitation systems of
the synchronous generators or designing decentralized local
controllers [2], [4]. However, the effectiveness of such
controllers to damp interarea oscillations is limited because
interarea modes are not always controllable or observable
or both from the local signals [5]. With the development
of wide-area measurement system (WAMS) and deploy-
ment of synchronized phasor measurement units, wide-area
damping controllers (WADCs) based on remote signals have
been proposed to enhance the damping of the interarea
oscillations [5][8].
The implementation of WADC requires communication
channels to transmit remote signals, which introduce time
delays into the control-loop of the WADC [9], [12]. These
time delays can typically range from tens to several hundred
milliseconds, depending upon the type of communication
channels, routines of signal transmission, transmission pro-
tocols, and communication loads [9][11], [13]. As the time
delays would degrade system damping performance or even
cause system instability, they must be taken into account
during the design of the WADC [14]. Another challenge of
designing a WADC is the availability of an accurate model of
the large-scale power system, because of model uncertainties
of a large number of components and variation of operating
conditions [15].
Time delays and model uncertainties have been taken into
account in the design/synthesis of the WADC. The existing
research results can be mainly classified into the following
two categories. The first one is to apply the robust control
methods to handle the model uncertainties. Among these
results, some of them did not consider the impact of the
time delays at the design stage [15][19], whereas most
of them treated the delays as part of system uncertainties
[20][24]. The second one considers the compensation of
communication delays at the design stage, such as a smith
predictor-based H controller [21], [22], recurrent neural
28 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CONTROL SYSTEMS TECHNOLOGY, VOL. 23, NO. 1, JANUARY 2015
network-based adaptive WADC [25], stochastic subspace
identification-based adaptive WADC [26], and fuzzy-logic
control-based WADC [27]. Most of these results handle
constant delays with a known upper-bound, whereas random
delays and data unavailability caused by data packet drop
or physical failure of communication channels have not
been investigated. For compensating constant and time-
varying delays, an adaptive phasor power oscillation damping
controller [28] and a delay-dependent state feedback WADC
based on Lyapunov stability theory and linear matrix inequal-
ities technique [12] have been proposed. However, the design
of the WADC proposed in [12] is based on the accurate
linearization model of a large-scale power system, which is not
easily available and the linearization may cause extra errors.
Based on the rapid development of communication networks
in the last two decades, networked control systems (NCS) have
emerged as a new type of spatially distributed control system,
in which sensors, actuators, and controllers are connected
through a shared digital communication network with limit
bandwidth [29]. In terms of the control system, the large-
scale power system equipped with the WADCs is a typical
NCS because of the involvement of communication channels
in the control loop [12], [34]. To tackle those challenges
introduced by communication networks, such as time delays
and data packet drops, networked predictive control (NPC)
has been proposed as one of the effective control algorithms
as it can simultaneously provide online optimal control and
compensation of delays [30][32].
This paper investigates the design of a new WADC
for a selected generator exciter based on NPC, so-called
NPC-WADC, to enhance the damping of interarea oscillations
and provide active compensation of delays in the control
loop. Moreover, model identification technique is adopted
to obtain an equivalent low-order model for the prediction
model of the NPC. This paper extends [33] and [34], in
which model identification and generalized predictive control
(GPC) are employed to design an adaptive GPC-based WADC
(GPC-WADC) [33] and the preliminary result about
NPC-WADC design as well as its verification on a simple
four-machine power system is given in [34].
The remainder of this paper is organized as follows.
Section II briefly recalls the NPC and model identification
methods. The design procedure of the proposed NPC-WADC
is given in Section III. In Section IV, a case study based on the
New England 39-bus system is carried out to demonstrate the
effectiveness of the NPC-WADC. Finally, Section V presents
the conclusions.
II. C ONTROL M ETHODOLOGIES
This section will briefly present the NPC scheme [30][32]
and a model identification algorithm based on recursive least-
squares (RLS) with a variable forgetting factor [34], [35].
The configuration diagram of an NPC combined with model
identification is shown in Fig. 1, which includes three main
components: 1) GPC; 2) network delay compensator (NDC);
and 3) online model identifier. Although communication
networks introduce new challenges, such as time delay,
Fig. 1. Scheme of the NPC.
data packet drop, disordering into the control loop, they also
offer one main advantage that a group of data is transmitted in
a packet at one transmission. The NPC takes advantage of this
feature and transmits the optimal control prediction sequence
obtained by the GPC to the plant side, then employs an
NDC to identify time delays and determine the corresponding
control prediction. Model identification is used to deal with
model uncertainties and provide an adaptive predictive model
for GPC.
At each control step, the current control prediction
sequence, together with time stamp, are transmitted in one
packet from the controller side to the plant side. At each
sampling step, the current and the past several steps of
measurements will be sent in one packet with time stamp from
the measurement side to the controller side. The buffer will
only be updated if a packet with a new time stamp is received.
This case probably happens because of packet disordering.
Compared with the conventional GPC, which only uses the
first step of the control prediction, the NPC utilizes all steps
of the control prediction.
A. Generalized Predictive Control
Future optimal control sequence is obtained by the GPC
and based on a controlled autoregressive and moving average
(CARMA) model [36], [37] shown as follows:
A(z 1 )y(t) = B(z 1 )u(t 1) + C(z 1 )e(t) (1)
where y(t) and u(t) are the output and input of the system,
respectively. A(z 1 ) R[z 1 , n a ], A(z 1 ) = a0 + a1 z 1 +
+ ana z na and a0 = 1, B(z 1 ) R[z 1 , n b ], B(z 1 ) =
b0 + b1 z 1 + + bnb z nb . For simplicity, it is assumed that
e(t) is white noise giving C(z 1 ) = 1. Details of the GPC
based on CARMA model are not described in this paper [36].
At the tth sampling instant, delay in the feedback channel
is tsc , then the plant outputs y received at the controller side
is y(t tsc ). The design of WADC for power systems is a
regulation problem. Thus, the quadratic cost function to be
minimized is defined as follows:
j =N
J (N, Nu ) = E 
y(t tsc + j |t tsc )2
j =1
j=Nu
+ r j u(t tsc + j 1|t tsc )2 (2)
j =1
YAO et al.: WADC FOR POWER SYSTEM INTERAREA OSCILLATIONS
where E{.} is the expectation operator, and  y(t tsc + j |t tsc )
is an optimal j -step ahead prediction of the system output at
time t tsc . N is the prediction horizon, u(t tsc + j 1|
t tsc ) is an optimal j -step ahead prediction of the system
input at time t tsc , Nu is the control horizon, and r j is control
weighting sequence and usually defined as a constant value,
r j = r , for j = 1, 2, . . . , Nu .
By solving the Diophantine equations,  y(t tsc + j |t tsc )
is obtained as follows:
y(t tsc + j |t tsc) = G j (z 1 )u(t tsc + j 1|t tsc ) + f j (3)
 scale detailed model. However, for the design of a damping
where G j (z 1 ) is an unique polynomials of order j 1,
f j = F j (z 1 )y(t tsc ) + H j (z 1 )u(t tsc 1).
The N j-ahead predictions can be represented by the
following matrix equation:
Y = GU + f
, G, U , and f are denoted in the Appendix in
Y K (t) = P(t 1)(t)/[1 + T (t)P(t 1)(t)]
detail.
In practice, the constraints of the control signal should be
considered and can be expressed as follows:
I Umin U I Umax
where Umin and Umax denote the lower and upper limits of
the control signal. I denotes the Nu identity vector.
According to (2), (4), and (5), the implementation of
GPC with bounded signals can be represented as a quadratic
programming (QP) problem, which can be stated as
1 T
min J (U ) = U H U + bT U + f0
2
s.t. AqpU bc
where H = 2(G T G+ R), R = diag[ r1 , r2 , . . . r Nu ],
b = 2 f T G, f 0 = f T f , Aqp = [T, T ]T , and bc =
[I Umax , I Umin ]T . T is the identity matrix.
The optimal future Nu steps control vector U can
be obtained by solving the above QP problem. Then, U are
packed together with a time stamp t tsc and sent to the plant
side.
B. Network Delay Compensator
The NDC determines the time delay and chooses the cor-
responding control prediction. All time delays existing in the
closed-loop are defined as a round-trip time (RTT) delay in
the feedback loop as follows [32]:
tr = tsc + tc + tca
where tr is the RTT delay, tsc is the delay of the feedback
channel, tca the delay of the forward channel, and tc is the
processing time of the controller. By comparing the current
time t at the controller side with the time stamp ts at the
latest control packet U (ts ), the RTT and current control u(t)
can be obtained as
tr = t ts (8)
U (ts ) = [u(ts |ts ) u(ts + 1|ts ) u(ts + Nu 1|ts )] (9)
u(t) = u(ts + tr |ts ) = u(t|ts )
29
This method can measure both constant and random delays
as it does not rely on the type and traffic condition of
the communication networks. Note that GPC without delay
compensation will use the first step of control from the current
available control prediction, i.e., u(t) = u(ts |ts ).
C. Online Model Identification
As a large-scale power system is a complex, nonlinear, and
high-order dynamic system, it is difficult to obtain its full-
controller, a low-order equivalent linear model, whose struc-
ture is fixed and parameters vary with the operating conditions,
is accurate enough and can be estimated by a RLS algorithm
with a varying forgetting factor [35]. For CARMA model
shown in (1), the algorithm can be written as
(4) (t) = y(t) T (t)
(t 1)

(t) = 
(t 1) + K (t)(t)
(t) = 1 [1 (t)T K (t)](t)2 /0
P(t) = [I K (t) T (t)]P(t 1)/(t) (11)
(5)
where  (t) = [a1 , . . . , ana , b0 , . . . , bnb ]T is the estimated
parameter vector. (t) = [y(t tsc 1), . . . , y
(t tsc n a ), u(t tsc 1), . . . , u(t tsc n b 1)]T
denotes the measurement vector. P(t) is the covariance
matrix, I is an identity matrix, K (t) is the adjustment gains,
0 < < 1 is the forgetting factor used to progressively reduce
the effects of old measurements, and 0 is the preselected
constant. In addition, moving boundaries are introduced for
(6) every parameter to protect the parameters from large modeling
errors, which are caused by a variety of sudden disturbances
in the power system [34].
III. D ESIGN P ROCEDURE OF THE NPC-WADC
The selection of the wide-area stabilizing signals and con-
trol location plays an important role in the design of the
WADC [18], [41]. Modal controllability/observability-based
approaches have been often used to select location and a
suitable feedback signal for the WADC, such as residues
approach [5] and geometric approach [38]. As the comparison
results of this two approaches provided in [40] show that
the damping controller using the signals recommended by the
geometric approach can always obtain the best robustness and
performances, the geometric approach is also adopted to select
(7) the wide-area stabilizing signals and control location for the
WADC in this paper.
The configuration of a large-scale power system equipped
with an NPC-WADC is shown in Fig. 2. The selected wide-
area signals y(t) are measured via the WAMS and sent to
the WADC installed at the selected generator as the input
signal through communication networks. The proposed WADC
adopts a structure similar with [5] and [33]. The conventional
PSS with the local rotor speed as the input and u l as the
output signal, is designed to provide damping for local mode
oscillations, whereas the output signal u g of the WADC is
(10) added to the excitation system of the selected generator to
30 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CONTROL SYSTEMS TECHNOLOGY, VOL. 23, NO. 1, JANUARY 2015

Fig. 2. Configuration of the generator equipped with a local PSS and an

NPC-WADC.

damp the interarea mode oscillation. tca = 0 as the WADC is

installed at the generator side.
Detailed steps of design an NPC-WADC are summarized as
follows. Fig. 3. New England 10-machine 39-bus power system.
Step 1: Carrying out modal analysis of the detailed nonlinear
TABLE I
model based on MATLAB/SIMULINK and selecting the wide-
area feedback control signal and the generator to install the C LASSIFICATION OF O SCILLATION M ODES OF THE T EST

WADC, using geometric approach [18], [38]. S YSTEM (W ITH PSS M EANS G1, G3, G4, G7, G8,
AND G9 E QUIPPED W ITH PSS)
Step 2: Determining the order of the reduced-order model
of the power system, excluding the WADC using the Schur
balanced truncation method, based on the frequency response
in the frequency range of interarea oscillation [14].
Step 3: Based on the model order determined in Step 2, the
low-order equivalent model is obtained via model identifica-
tion algorithm and used as the prediction model for the NPC.
Step 4: Design of NPC-WADC using the model obtained
in Step 3 as the prediction model and choosing the following
parameters: 1) the output prediction horizon N; 2) the control
horizon Nu , N > Nu ; 3) the weighting sequence r ; and
4) sampling period Ts . For effective compensation of the
time delays, Nu should be larger than the maximal RTT A. Modal Analysis
communication delays. The nonlinear model of the New England 39-bus power
Step 5: Simulation studies are carried out based on the system is linearized at a nominal operating condition [39].
detailed nonlinear model, under different faults and vari- The classification results of oscillation modes of this test
ous operating conditions, to verify the effectiveness of the system without PSS and with several PSSs are given in
NPC-WADC and compare it with the GPC-WADC without Table I. Since the test system without PSS has two modes with
delay compensation and the conventional lead-lag WADC. negative damping ratios, several PSSs are added to generators
to improve the stability of the system. It can be found that
IV. C ASE S TUDY this system with several PSSs still has several local and
interarea modes whose damping ratios are <0.1. Modes 13
To demonstrate the effectiveness of the NPC-WADC, case
are interarea modes, whereas Modes 49 are local ones.
study is based on the New England 10-machine 39-bus system,
Compared with the Mode 1, Modes 29 have relatively higher
as shown in Fig. 3. This test system consists of 10 machines,
frequencies and larger damping ratios, thus it is not necessary
39 buses, and 46 lines, and its detailed parameters are given
to provide supplementary damping to these modes [28]. There-
in [39]. It has been widely used as a test benchmark for
fore, the WADC should be designed to provide damping for
studying the low-frequency oscillations as it performs several
the critical Mode 1, as it has smallest damping ratio 0.0442
interarea modes under disturbances or faults. Each of the gen-
and lowest oscillation frequency 0.6273 Hz.
erators is represented by a fourth-order model and equipped
with an IEEE ST1A excitation system. The transmission
B. Location of WADC and Selection of Wide-Area Signals
system is modeled as a passive circuit, whereas the loads
are considered as constant impedances. The output of the To determine controller location and wide-area feed-
mechanical power of each generator is treated as a constant back signals, geometric measures of modal controllabil-
value for simplicity. ity/observability are used to evaluate the relative strength
YAO et al.: WADC FOR POWER SYSTEM INTERAREA OSCILLATIONS
Fig. 4. Geometric controllability/observability associated with Modes 13.
of candidate signals and the performance of controllers at
different locations with respect to a given interarea mode
[18]. The geometric controllability/observability associated
with different interarea modes is shown in Fig. 4. Note that
the number of transmission lines is given in [39]. The WADC
should be located on the generator, which has larger geometric
controllability with respect to the mode concerned, whereas
smaller geometric controllability with respect to other modes
in order to reduce the effect on other modes. Therefore, G4 is
selected as controller location. Similarly, it can be found that
active power of the transmission line 7 (P318 , line between
bus 3 and bus 18) has the largest geometric observability with
respect to Mode 1 and smaller geometric observability with
respect to Modes 2 and 3. Hence, deviation of P318 is chosen
as the wide-area feedback signal for the proposed WADC.
C. Design of NPC-WADC
Using the model reduction techniques given in [14], the
order of the equivalent model is chosen to be n a = 7 and
n b = 7 since this model is enough accurate for design
of WADC. Based on the general guidelines given in [35],
parameters of the online identifier are chosen as: 1) 0 = 0.2;
2) T = 10; and 3) = 0.02. The wide-area signal P318
(p.u.) is scaled to 0.1P318 . A washout filter is added to
eliminate constant deviation of P318 when the operating
condition of the system is changed.
For the NPC-WADC, the sampling period Ts = 100 ms is
obtained based on the frequency range of the critical interarea
mode. As the range of the communication delays introduced
from WAMS vary from tens to several hundreds milliseconds,
Nu = 12 is chosen to compensate the delays less than
Nu Ts = 1.2 s. As prediction horizon N is usually larger
than Nu , N = 25 is used. The desired response can be
achieved by setting weighting sequence r = 0.3. To avoid the
excessive interference of the local control mode, the output of
the WADC is limited to 0.1 p.u. [34].
Effectiveness of the proposed NPC-WADC is verified by
simulation studies based on MATLAB/SIMULINK software,
31
Fig. 5. Responses to fault Scenario I, without communication delay.
compared with the GPC-WADC [33] and the conventional
WADC (CWADC) [5]. The GPC-WADC and NPC-WADC
use same parameters for the GPC part. The main difference
between them is the NPC-WADC uses the N-step forward
control prediction to compensate the communication delay
existing in the control-loop, whereas the GPC-WADC only
uses the first step control prediction. In addition, the transfer
function of the CWADC is given as follows:
10s 1 + 0.6280s 3
HWADC(s) = 0.01 (12)
1 + 10s 1 + 0.1025s
Simulation studies are carried out based on the detailed
nonlinear model to verify the effectiveness of the proposed
NPC-WADC under a wide range of operating conditions
and different constant and random communication delays.
The following two scenarios are considered.
Scenario I: A three-phase-to-ground fault (fault F1 shown
in Fig. 3) occurs at the end terminal of line between bus 3
and 4 near bus 3 at t = 0.5 s, followed by switching off the
faulty transmission line at t = 0.6 s.
Scenario II: A three-phase-to-ground fault (fault F2 shown
in Fig. 3) occurs at the end terminal of tie-line between bus
15 and 16 near bus 15 at t = 0.5 s, followed by switching off
the faulty tie-line at t = 0.6 s.
Note that the test system operates at a new operating point
during the postfault period because of the outage of the faulty
transmission line, and the Scenario II represents a larger
change of operating conditions.
D. Without Communication Delays
System responses to fault Scenario I without communication
delays are shown in Fig. 5. Responses of active power of
transmission line P318 and P1718 are presented as they
illustrate the oscillation behavior of the Mode 1. It reveals
that the NPC-WADC provides slightly better damping perfor-
mance than the CWADC. Note that the GPC-WADC provides
the same damping performance with NPC-WADC, because
32 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CONTROL SYSTEMS TECHNOLOGY, VOL. 23, NO. 1, JANUARY 2015

Fig. 6. Identified parameters A(z 1 ).

Fig. 8. Responses to measurement noise under fault Scenario I, adding white
noise with magnitude 0.05 p.u. (5 MW) in feedback signal P318 .

Fig. 7. Identified parameters B(z 1 ).

Fig. 9. Responses to fault Scenario I, with 100 ms constant delay.

the only difference between NPC-WADC and GPC-WADC is
that the NPC-WADC has an NDC.
The identified parameters of the prediction model are shown
in Figs. 6 and 7. It shows that the identified parameters update
fast enough to track the dynamic of the power system and then
converge to a new operating condition.
In addition, since there always exists the measurement
noise in a real system, the performance of the proposed
NPC-WADC in case of measurement noise is verified by
adding white noise with magnitude of 0.05 p.u. (5 MW) into
the feedback signal P318 . System response to fault Scenario I
is shown in Fig. 8. It reveals that the proposed WADC can still
provide a good damping performance in case of measurement
noise.

E. With Constant Communication Delays

System responses to fault Scenario I with two different
constant delays 100 and 200 ms are shown in Figs. 9 and 10,
respectively. From the two figures, it can be observed that the
CWADC cannot maintain the stability of the whole system
when the time delay reaches 100 ms, whereas the GPC-WADC
cannot provide satisfactory damping performance when the
Fig. 10. Responses to fault Scenario I, with 200 ms constant delay.
time delay reaches 200 ms. However, at both cases, the
NPC-WADC can maintain the stability of the whole system,
which demonstrate its ability of compensation the time delays.
YAO et al.: WADC FOR POWER SYSTEM INTERAREA OSCILLATIONS 33

Fig. 11. Responses to fault Scenario I, with different constant delays.

The responses under larger time delays, 400, 600, and

800 ms, are also given in Fig. 11. It is found, with
larger delays, NPC-WADC can still provide satisfactory
damping performance and compensate the delay effectively.
Responses provided by CWADC and GPC-WADC are not
presented because both of them cannot maintain the stability
of the whole system. In addition, it also can be found that the
NPC-WADC under different constant communication delays
provides almost the same damping performance.

F. With Random Communication Delays

With random communication delays distributing between
200 and 600 ms, the system responses to fault Scenario I
are shown in Fig. 12. It can be found that the identified
value of the RTT delays tr varies from three-step to six-step
delays (note that sampling period Ts = 100 ms). The NDC
will choose the corresponding control prediction according
to the value of tr at each control step. It is shown that the
NPC-WADC can damp the interarea oscillation effectively,
whereas the GPC-WADC cannot maintain the stability of the
whole system.

G. Delay Margin of NPC-WADC Fig. 12. Responses to fault Scenario I, with 200600 ms random delays.

The responses of the test system installed with NPC-WADC

as 1700 ms (i.e., 17-step delays). Note that when the value of
in presence of longer time delays are shown in Fig. 13. It is
delays is increased, the damping performances provided by
found, when the time delay is under 1200 ms, NPC-WADC
the NPC-WADC degrade slightly due to the inaccuracy of the
performs better than without WADC, whereas the NPC-WADC
identified model and prediction.
cannot handle the constant delays, which are bigger than
Due to the combination of the model identification
1500 ms. This is because that the control prediction horizon
algorithm and NPC, the calculation of delay margin of a power
Nu = 12 and the sampling interval is 100 ms.
system equipped with an NPC-WADC is a challenge task via
The maximal delay with which NPC-WADC can com-
the method reported in [14] and will be investigated here only
pensate is limited by the control prediction horizon Nu .
via simulation studies.
By increasing the values of Nu and the corresponding predic-
tion range N, the delay handled by NPC-WADC will increase.
To test this capability, Nu = 17 is chosen. The system H. Different Operating Conditions
responses with large delays are shown in Fig. 14. It reveals that System response to fault Scenario II, which causes large
NPC-WADC can still work properly when the delay is as large variation of operation conditions after the outage of the faulty
34 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CONTROL SYSTEMS TECHNOLOGY, VOL. 23, NO. 1, JANUARY 2015
Fig. 13. Delay margin of NPC-WADC with Nu = 12, under fault Scenario I.
Fig. 14. Delay margin of NPC-WADC with Nu = 17, under fault Scenario I.
tie-line between bus 15 and 16, and without communication
delays are considered, is shown in Fig. 15. It is observed
that the NPC-WADC effectively damps the power oscillations,
whereas the CWADC cannot maintain the whole system sta-
bility due to the large change of operation condition caused
by the outage of tie-line between bus 15 and 16. Furthermore,
system responses to fault Scenario II with 300- and 500-ms
constant communication delays are also given in Fig. 16.
It reveals that the oscillations are well damped because
the NPC-WADC compensates the communication delays
effectively.
I. Comments
Simulation results show that the NPC-WADC can provide
better damping performance than the CWADC. However, it is
worth pointing out that the NPC-WADC has a more complex
structure and thus requires more computation time than the
CWADC. Moreover, the NPC-WADC requires more control
Fig. 15. Responses to fault Scenario II, without communication delays.
Fig. 16. Responses to fault Scenario II, with different communication delays.
effort to achieve better performance than the CWADC even
without the time delays.
V. C ONCLUSION
A WADC has been proposed based on NPC and model
identification technique for enhancing the damping of power
system interarea oscillations and improving power system
stability. The proposed NPC-WADC can effectively damp
interarea oscillations and actively compensate time delays in
the wide-area feedback signals. Moreover, model identifica-
tion has been applied to deal with model uncertainties of
the large-scale power systems and obtain a reduced-order
equivalent prediction model for the NPC-WADC. Detailed
design procedures of the NPC-WADC have been given and
demonstrated via case studies based on the New England
10-machine 39-bus system, comparing with the GPC-WADC
without delay compensation, conventional lead-lag WADC
and only local PSSs without WADC. Simulation results
YAO et al.: WADC FOR POWER SYSTEM INTERAREA OSCILLATIONS 35

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Wei Yao (M13) received the B.Sc. and Ph.D.
degrees in electrical engineering from the Huazhong
University of Science and Technology (HUST),
Wuhan, China, in 2004 and 2010, respectively.
He was a Post-Doctoral Researcher with the
Department of Power Engineering, HUST, from
2010 to 2012, where he is currently a Lecturer with
the School of Electrical and Electronics Engineering.
Since 2012, he has been a Post-Doctoral Research
Associate with the Department of Electrical Engi-
neering and Electronics, University of Liverpool,
Liverpool, U.K. His current research interests include power system stability
analysis and control, and renewable energy.
Lin Jiang (M00) received the B.Sc. and M.Sc.
degrees in electrical engineering from the Huazhong
University of Science and Technology, Wuhan,
China, and the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering
from the University of Liverpool, Liverpool, U.K.,
in 1992, 1996, and 2001, respectively.
He was a Post-Doctoral Research Assistant with
the University of Liverpool from 2001 to 2003 and
a Post-Doctoral Research Associate with the Depart-
ment of Automatic Control and Systems Engineer-
ing, University of Sheffield, Sheffield, U.K., from
2003 to 2005. He was a Senior Lecturer with the University of Glamorgan,
Wales, U.K., from 2005 to 2007, and joined the University of Liverpool in
2007. He is currently a Senior Lecturer with the Department of Electrical
Engineering and Electronics, University of Liverpool. His current research
interests include control and analysis of power system, smart grid, and
renewable energy.
Jinyu Wen (M10) received the B.Sc. and Ph.D.
degrees in electrical engineering from the Huazhong
University of Science and Technology (HUST),
Wuhan, China, in 1992 and 1998, respectively.
He was a Visiting Student from 1996 to 1997
and a Research Fellow from 2002 to 2003 with
the University of Liverpool, Liverpool, U.K., and a
Senior Visiting Researcher with the University of
Texas at Arlington, Arlington, TX, USA, in 2010.
From 1998 to 2002, he was a Director Engineer
with XJ Electric Company, Ltd., Xuchang, China.
In 2003, he joined the HUST, where he is currently a Professor with the
School of Electrical and Electronics Engineering. His current research interests
include renewable energy integration, energy storage, multiterminal HVDC,
and power system operation and control.
Qinghua Wu (M91SM97F11) received the
M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering
from the Huazhong University of Science and Tech-
nology (HUST), Wuhan, China, and the Queens
University of Belfast (QUB), Belfast, U.K., in 1981
and 1987, respectively.
He was a Lecturer in Electrical Engineering at
HUST from 1981 to 1984, a Research Fellow and
Senior Research Fellow at QUB from 1987 to 1991,
and a Lecturer and Senior Lecturer with the Depart-
ment of Mathematical Sciences, Loughborough Uni-
versity of Technology, Leicestershire, U.K., from 1991 to 1995. Since 1995, he
has been the Chair of Electrical Engineering with the Department of Electrical
Engineering and Electronics, University of Liverpool, Liverpool, U.K., as the
Head of the Intelligence Engineering and Automation Group. His current
research interests include adaptive control, mathematical morphology, neural
networks, learning systems, evolutionary computation, and power system
control and operation.
Shijie Cheng (M86SM87F11) received the
B.S. degree from Xian Jiaotong University, Xian,
China, the M.Sc.degree from the Huazhong Univer-
sity of Science and Technology (HUST), Wuhan,
China, and the Ph.D. degree from the University
of Calgary, Calgary, AB, Canada, all in electrical
engineering, in 1967, 1981, and 1986, respectively.
He has been a Professor with the School of Electri-
cal and Electronics Engineering, HUST, since 1991.
His current research interests include power system
control and stability analysis, application of artificial
intelligence, and energy storage.
Prof. Cheng is a fellow of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.