New trends in the development of wide-area damping control systems

The strain on modern electrical power system operation has led to an ever increasing utilization of new Information Communication Technology (ICT) systems to enhance the reliability and efficiency of grid operation. Among all the "ICT-intensive" Smart Grid applications, the utilization of PMU data to improve power system damping for inter-area oscillations has attracted many attentions. There are a multitude of research initiatives in both academia and industry, however, the number of actual implementations is rather limited. One of the major obstacles is the data quality issues, e.g., delay, packet loss and disorder, etc., incurred in the process of PMU data communication. Furthermore, validation of networked control systems as such requires new tools that are able to incorporate models both of the physical and cyber systems. The purpose of this paper is to report the recent efforts in profiling PMU communication delay patterns and their applications to design PMU-based damping control systems. In addition, a concise literature review on the emerging topic of developing cyber-physical simulation platforms is also included in this paper.