Event-Triggered Load Frequency Control Based on Age-of-Information

• Published in: IEEE transactions on power systems Vol. 38; no. 3; pp. 2348 - 2361
• Main Authors: Lin, Chengrong, Hu, Bo, Shao, Changzheng, Ye, Yuyun, Tai, Heng-Ming, Xie, Kaigui, Jiao, Dan, Li, Weizhan
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York IEEE 01.05.2023; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: age of information (AoI); Bandwidth; Communication channels; Controllers; Delays; Electrical loads; event-triggered control; Frequency control; Freshness; Information management; Intelligent sensors; Linear quadratic regulator; Load frequency control (LFC); LQR control; power system; Power systems; Real-time systems; Smart grid
• ISSN: 0885-8950; 1558-0679
• DOI: 10.1109/TPWRS.2022.3186333

This article investigates the role of age of information (AoI) in the load frequency control (LFC) of power systems. Smart grids employ an open information update system, which introduces pressing issues such as management of information freshness and limitation of communication bandwidth. Communication delay, though widely used to characterize the information packets, is not able to keep up the information freshness and often becomes the inherent source of information staleness. In this article, AoI is used in the design of an event-triggered communication scheduler to manage the information updating process and alleviate the effect of limited communication bandwidth. AoI is also used in the design of an LQR (linear quadratic regulator) controller for the improvement of LFC performance. Case studies are presented to demonstrate that the proposed LFC-AoI model and the event-triggered LQR controller offer better LFC performance than the existing LFC methods.