Decomposition–coordination strategy to improve power transfer capability of interconnected systems

The maximum power transfer across critical corridors or interfaces is limited by various system constraints such as thermal, voltage, and stability limits. In an open transmission access environment, these constraints would be deeply influenced by the interactions among the path flows in different control areas. In particular, small signal stability, commonly in the form of low frequency oscillations, is considered a crucial factor since it limits the power transfer capability of transmission paths in interconnected multi-area systems. Based on such considerations, the focal point of this paper will be a new approach to coordinating the path transfers across multiple control areas, giving exclusive attention to the small signal stability. The differential eigenvalue method is used to derive the damping ratio constraints for satisfying the small signal stability criteria which are linear inequality constraints expressed in terms of the control parameter. Using Bender’s decomposition, the proposed methodology is formulated as a master problem and a set of sub-problems, each associated with one area motivated by the improvement of the overall computational efficiency via parallel processing. The performance of the decomposition–coordination method is illustrated with a 68-bus system from which it might be deduced that inter-area transfer margin could be improved by reasonable rescheduling of the neighboring tie-line flows. 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.