Decentralised power system load frequency control beyond the limit of diagonal dominance

The design of decentralised robust load frequency control for interconnected multi-area power systems is studied in this paper. It is shown that although the design can be naturally formulated as a large-scale system decentralised control problem, it can be translated into an equivalent problem of decentralised controller design for a multi-input multi-output (MIMO) control system. It is known that simple controllers can be designed to achieve satisfactory performances if diagonal dominance can be achieved in a multivariable system. This is further extended in this paper. Using the design method proposed in this paper, even when the diagonal dominance cannot be achieved, subject to a condition based on the structured singular values (SSVs), each local area load-frequency controller can be designed independently. The robust stability condition for the overall system can be easily stated as to achieve a sufficient interaction margin, and a sufficient gain and phase margin during each independent design. © 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.