Optimal design and control loop selection for a STATCOM wide-area damping controller considering communication time delays

Wide-area damping controllers (WADC) have been shown to be effective in damping interarea oscillation modes. The varying nature of power system operating point requires the design of an adaptive WADC. Majority of the existing control design techniques rely on empirical approaches at one or more of their design stages, which makes it difficult to implement in adaptive control techniques. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to provide a systematic procedure based entirely on numerical approaches for designing a STATCOM-based WADC. The proposed procedure involving control loop selection, control design and adaptive time delay compensation, can then be implemented in adaptive WADC schemes. Geometric analysis has been used to choose the STATCOM location. Then, a novel optimization-based signal selection methodology is proposed. The proposed methodology employs a combination of multiple input signals to optimally generate a signal with the required modal objectives like enhancing observability and reducing interaction between different control loops. After that, another optimization problem is formulated to tune the controller parameters using integral of time multiplied by absolute error (ITAE) as the optimization objective. Both optimization problems have been evaluated using two optimization techniques: Particle swarm optimization (PSO) and self-adaptive multi-population elitist Jaya algorithm (SAMPE-JAYA). Finally, an adaptive delay compensator is designed to mitigate the effects of communication time delays. The proposed control strategy is applied on the IEEE 68-bus system and the controller performance is evaluated by modal analysis and multiple time-domain simulation scenarios.