Design of a resilient wide-area damping controller using time delays

The presence of oscillation modes in a power system with low damping rates can compromise its proper operation and motivated the development of different damping control projects to improve these damping rates. Central damping controllers using PMU data showed to be able to mitigate oscillation modes of power systems with high damping ratios. However, time delays and vulnerability of communication channels to cyber-attacks can damage the desired operation of this type of damping controller. This paper proposes an optimization problem-based method for designing centralized controllers that are resilient to channel losses and using time delays as variables of the proposed optimization procedure. The bio-inspired algorithms Marine Predators Algorithm, Particle Swarm Optimization and Genetic Algorithms were applied and evaluated in the proposed optimization model. The IEEE 68-bus was used as a test system, and a set of case studies were carried out. The obtained results show that considering time delays as optimization variables can be beneficial to achieve optimal control objectives. Furthermore, the communication failure robustness strategy was effective as observed by the modal analyses and nonlinear time domain simulations of the test system under contingencies.