Design phasor data concentrator as adaptive delay buffer for wide-area damping control

•PDC with adaptive wait time is proposed to reduce the frequency of adapting control gain in the delay-robust damping control system.•Extend the IEEE Standard C37.244 by proposing two methods to determine PDC wait time.•The proposed methods are validated using co-simulations that combine power system and communication network studies.•Communication network simulation parameters are derived based on information from an empirical study to ensure the credibility of the study.

Phasor Data Concentrators (PDCs) are employed to aggregate data frames from multiple Phasor Measurement Units (PMUs) with the same time-stamp into data packets. This function is an essential step in the utilization of PMU data in Wide-Area Monitoring and Control (WAMC) system. This is facilitated by assigning a fixed and heuristically decided wait time to the PDC buffer. The processed PMU data packets are sent to WAMC applications or similarly PDCs at higher hierarchies in the WAMC system when either a PDC buffer is full or its wait time has passed. In this paper, two methods to configure adaptive PDC wait time based on recent PMU traffic delay patterns are proposed. The purpose is to reduce the frequency of performing delay compensations in wide-area damping control system. With the adaptive PDC delay buffer in place, the wide-area damping controller only switches its gain once every five seconds, given the studied PMU traffic delay scenarios, instead of the current practice which requires the control gain to be adapted on a per PMU data frame basis, e.g., 50 or 60 times every second. The proposed methods offer a perspective to efficiently utilize the supporting Information and Communication Technology infrastructure with the purpose to simplify the design and implementation of wide-area damping control system.