This paper summarizes a set of six benchmark systems for the analysis and control of electromechanical oscillations in power systems, recommended by the IEEE Task Force on Benchmark Systems for Stability Controls of the Power System Dynamic Performance Committee. The benchmark systems were chosen for their tutorial value and particular characteristics leading to control the system design problems relevant to the research community. For each benchmark, the modeling guidelines are provided, along with eigenvalues and time-domain results produced with at least two simulation softwares, and one possible control approach is provided for each system as well. Researchers and practicing engineers are encouraged to use these benchmark systems when assessing new oscillation damping control strategies.

The idea of a smart grid is based on the increased integration of information technologies throughout the power grid. Technologies such as phasor measurement units (PMUs) are being deployed to increase the number of wide-area measurements across the bulk power system providing increased awareness of the system operational state. However, from a critical infrastructure perspective, the advanced metering infrastructure introduces a concern: the loss of communication among devices and the power grid. This communication loss may interfere with the wide-area control system performance and adversely affect the power system dynamics. This paper proposes a method based on genetic algorithms for wide-area robust damping controller design considering multiple operation points and loss of communication links related to the input and to the output of the central controller. The method is applied to enhance the damping of the electromechanical oscillations in an IEEE benchmark system: the Simplified 14-Generator Model of the Southeastern Australian Power System. The performance of the designed controller is evaluated using modal analysis and non-linear simulations in the time-domain. The obtained results demonstrate the effectiveness of the method to design a single centralized controller that provides satisfactory damping to the electromechanical oscillations over several operating points, even when there is a loss of a communication link, thus being robust w.r.t. is an important aspect of a critical power grid infrastructure.

This paper proposes a combined adaptive virtual Inertia and adaptive damping control of a virtual synchronous generator (AID-VSG) to improve the dynamic frequency response of microgrids. In the proposed control scheme, the VSG’s virtual inertia and damping coefficients adapt themselves during the transients to, respectively, reduce frequency deviations and increase the oscillations’ damping. In addition, as an important feature, the proposed AID-VSG is suitable for distributed control scheme applications and is designed to not rely on phase-locked loop (PLL) measurements, which avoids PLL stability issues on weak grids. The control parameters of the proposed AID-VSG are tuned by the particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm to minimize the overshoot and settling time of the microgrid’s frequency during an islanding event. The AID-VSG is validated by a comparative analysis with three existing VSG control schemes, also tuned by the stated optimization algorithm. The performance of each compared VSG strategy is evaluated through the simulation of a set of 10,000 initial conditions, using the islanded microgrid’s nonlinear model. The best response among the VSG strategies was achieved by the proposed AID-VSG control for both the optimization problem and the set of initial conditions’ simulations.