Distributed Bilayered Control for Transient Frequency Safety and System Stability in Power Grids

Abstract

This paper considers power networks governed by swing nonlinear dynamics and subject to disturbances. We develop a bilayered control strategy for a subset of buses that simultaneously guarantees transient frequency safety of each individual bus and asymptotic stability of the entire network. The bottom layer is a model predictive controller that, based on periodically sampled system information, optimizes control resources to have transient frequency evolve close to a safe desired interval. The top layer is a real-time controller assisting the bottom-layer controller to guarantee transient frequency safety is actually achieved. We show that control signals at both layers are Lipschitz in the state and do not jeopardize stability of the network. Furthermore, we carefully characterize the information requirements at each bus necessary to implement the controller and employ saddle-point dynamics to introduce a distributed implementation that only requires information exchange with up to 2-hop neighbors in the power network. Simulations on the IEEE 39-bus power network illustrate our results.

Distributed Transient Safety Verification via Robust Control Invariant Sets: A Microgrid Application

“…Modelpredictive control [15] remains one of the most commonly used methods for enforcing dynamic constraints over some prediction horizon. However, it suffers from certain limitations in the context of power system dynamics, related to, for example, nonlinearity and associated complexity of the dynamics, information disparity due to communication overheads and/or privacy concerns, and computational burden, especially for longer prediction horizon [13]. To circumvent these issues, distributed safety verification and control methods based on robust forward set-invariance principles have been proposed in [11]- [14].…”