SUMMARYIn this paper, a systematic approach to design controllers based on H-infinity theory for a multimachine power system is presented. Generally, a centralized control scheme is difficult for a large-scale interconnected power system because of the necessity of obtaining information on the whole system, computation times, and so on. In order to handle these problems, two decentralized control schemes are proposed. One is based on the decomposition of information. The feedback gains for the whole system are obtained, and after decomposing the gains into subblocks for each area, the diagonal block is used to design the controller for each generator. The other is based on area decompositions. The procedure is carried out by decomposing the original system into blocks for each area and the local feedback gain is obtained by using information for each decomposed system. Furthermore, to improve the robustness of the system, an effective weighting matrix design, which involves the allocation of eigenvalues, is also proposed. Several simulation tests show the effectiveness of the proposed methods. ©