Adaptive inter-area oscillation damping controller for multi-machine power systems

•An adaptive damping controller is designed that automatically changes parameters.•An adaptive immunity is added to a Virtual Generator based Power System Stabilizer (VG-PSS) to further enhance the damping effectiveness.•The artificial immune system parameters are optimally tuned with PSO.•The system is able to be stabilized following a disturbance at very critical unknown operating conditions.

The interconnection of multiple generation units in a power system can lead to inter-area oscillations that generally occur under critical operating conditions. To damp these oscillations, supplementary control can be provided by a wide area control (WAC) system using remote measurements from the power system. Wide area controllers designed with traditional approaches are non-adaptive and thus their control policy may not be optimal to nonlinear operation conditions and disturbances. In this paper, the concept of an artificial immune system (AIS) is applied in the development of an innate and adaptive controller to handle known, unknown and random disturbances in a power system. Furthermore, with synchronous generator coherency grouping, remote virtual generator measurements are used to generate supplementary control signals to a synchronous generator that is identified to have maximum controllability on a power system. Real-time simulation and frequency analysis results show the superior performance of AIS-based controller in damping inter-area oscillations for different power system conditions and disturbances.