Control Approach for Self-Healing Power Systems: A Conceptual Overview

The deregulated markets and other factors are pushing power systems to their limits accentuating the need for more robust control. This paper presents a conceptual overview of a control approach for supporting a self-healing power system based on a distributed autonomous architecture and a set of coordinated closed loop controls. The proposed architecture is modular and scalable from the viewpoints of organizational, geographical and functional aspects and is applicable to systems ranging from small interconnections to continental-scale power grids. The approach calls for autonomous intelligent functional agents distributed throughout the system at various levels of control hierarchy. This paper further defines the framework for the coordination of the closed loop controls and the corresponding analytical tasks. The tasks are grouped into various execution cycles that collectively cover real-time operations of the power grid starting from hour-ahead scheduling of the market and other resources to rapid control of power system transients.