Multilevel Power-Imbalance Allocation Control for Secondary Frequency Control of Power Systems

A consensus-control-based multilevel control law named Multilevel Power-Imbalance Allocation Control (MLPIAC) is presented for a large-scale power system partitioned into two or more groups. Centralized control is implemented in each group while distributed control is implemented at the coordination level of the groups. Besides restoring nominal frequency with a minimal control cost, MLPIAC can improve the transient performance of the system through an accelerated convergence of the control inputs without oscillations. At the coordination level of the control groups, because the number of the groups is smaller than that of nodes, MLPIAC is more effective to obtain the minimized control cost than the purely distributed control law. At the level of the control in each group, because the number of nodes is much smaller than the total number of nodes in the whole network, the overheads in the communications and the computations are reduced compared to the pure centralized control. The asymptotic stability of MLPIAC is proven using the Lyapunov method and the performance is evaluated through simulations.