Compressive Sensing-Based Optimal Reactive Power Control of a Multi-Area Power System

To deal with the increasing load demand and environmental effects of conventional power devices, power system has become an enlarged complex network with the integration of distributed generators. Real-time control of power system now needs a massive amount of information to be transmitted between each local device and the central controller. The transmission of a huge quantity of information data poses great challenge to the communication network. To deal with this issue in reactive power control, this paper proposes a novel real-time compressive sensing-based optimal reactive power control of a multi-area interconnected power system. The objective is to minimize the power loss, voltage deviation, and reactive power generation cost simultaneously. According to the proposed scheme, the measured data in each control area is compressed before being transmitted through the communication network, and then recovered accurately by the discrete central controller. Orthogonal matching pursuit algorithm is adopted to recover the compressed data, owing to its fast convergence speed. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed compressive sensing-based approach by significantly reducing the data size of the transmitted data.