Distributed Observer-Based Event-Triggered Load Frequency Control of Multiarea Power Systems Under Cyber Attacks

Information and communication technology tremendously facilitates the operation efficiency and economy of modern power systems in recent years. However, risks such as bandwidth constraints and malicious attacks threaten the secure load frequency control (LFC) of power systems. To mitigate such risks, this paper proposes distributed observer-based event-triggered LFC schemes for multi-area power systems under cyber attacks. Considering the practical situation that only local system output information may be available, distributed observer-based LFC schemes are designed. Meanwhile, to reduce the communication burden, an event-triggered mechanism is adopted to design control laws, where both static and dynamic event-triggered approaches are taken and the dynamic one is proved to be more economical in terms of control cost. Verifiable sufficient conditions are established to guarantee the stability of the closed-loop system in the presence of cyber attacks and the controller gains are explicitly derived. Finally, validation studies on a three-area interconnected power system are carried out to demonstrate the proposed control schemes. Note to Practitioners—Load frequency is a crucial index for evaluating the quality of electric energy and thus LFC has brought considerable attention in the area of power systems control. Although many achievements have been made on the LFC of multi-area power systems, the risks such as bandwidth constraints and malicious attacks affect the normal operation of LFC due to the interconnection between different power systems. To deal with these risks, this paper focuses on designing event-triggered LFC to guarantee the stability of the frequency deviation while reducing the communication burden and mitigating cyber attacks. More importantly, the proposed event-triggered LFC is designed based on an observer and can be implemented in a distributed manner, which is relatively practical in real applications. The results presented in this paper aim to provide a helpful reference for stable and secure LFC design of multi-area power systems, such that the corresponding application research can be promoted.