Co-Design of Distributed Model-Based Control and Event-Triggering Scheme for Load Frequency Regulation in Smart Grids

In this paper, one new distributed load frequency regulation approach is proposed for smart power system operation under two specific practical constraints, including the limited communication resource and speed droop parametric uncertainty. To address these two constraints, the co-design of event-triggering communication scheme and distributed model-based controller is studied. Instead of using zero-order holders, the proposed model-based scheme is able to extend the maximum allowable time interval and thus reduce communication bandwidth usage. In the meantime, the proposed co-design scheme is able to get the model-based control parameters and event-triggering condition metrics simultaneously. This can loosen the conservation in the choice of control gains and event-triggering parameters faced by existing approaches where the control gains are fixed in prior. Comparisons on the multiple-area system confirm that this designed load frequency regulation method significantly reduces the number of required data transmissions without sacrificing the dynamic performance of the frequency and tie-line power. It is also shown that the proposed approach has great robustness to speed droop coefficient uncertainty.