Voltage Collapse Avoidance in Power Systems: A Receding Horizon Approach

In this paper, a receding horizon control approach is developed for voltage stabilization in power systems. The primary focus is on a benchmark system proposed in the context of a European project. The system is termed hybrid due to the finite set of control inputs, state automata description of the voltage primary controller and their interactions with the load nonlinear continuous dynamics. Moreover, the network topology imposes hard constraints on the states. All these make the control problem quite challenging. For different realistic scenarios, the proposed control algorithm is shown to stabilize the bus voltages at acceptable levels. The computational demand fits the real time allowed slot, making the scheme attractive for large scale applications as an area central controller.