Performance Evaluation for Damping Controllers of Power Systems Based on Multi-Layer Multi-Agent Systems

This paper proposes a methodology based on multi-layer multi-agent models, which is different from the existing multi-agent ones used in power system. In order to the performance evaluation of damping controllers of a power system, the considered system is modeled as a two-layer multi-agent system. The first layer is the device layer, which includes the generator and its associated controllers, and the second layer is the information layer, which is composed of the information agents, exchanging the information based on the wide area measurement system (WAMS) and sending the control signals to the power system stabilizers (PSSs). In the light of the proposed model, an index is presented to evaluate the performance of damping controllers to the system's inter-area oscillation with certain structures of the information interconnection layer. The index is corresponding to an optimal problem which minimize the distance of the special eigenvalue with respect to the image axis with fixed information layer structure. Furthermore, the impact of information interconnection structure on the damping performance is addressed. Finally, the simulation results in the 2-area 4-generator power system show the effectiveness of the proposed method.