The wide-area damping controller (WADC) is a centralized measurement-based controller to maintain small-signal stability in interconnected power systems. Due to its centralized structure, a communication network is needed to send the control signal to the actuators. A communication network has parameters such as time delay, packet dropout, and bandwidth limitations, which worsen with communication network congestion. Therefore, reducing the communication network usage can help to deal with them. In this paper, an event-triggered wide-area damping controller (ETWADC) is proposed to tackle this challenge and additionally save energy for the resources. In this approach, first, the inter-area oscillation modes of the system are determined through the fast Fourier transform (FFT). Next, based on system identification using measurement data, a multi-input multi-output (MIMO) model for the interconnected power system is obtained. Then, by applying the residue analysis, the optimal control loop is selected. Finally, an ETWADC is designed to dampen the inter-area oscillation of this optimal loop. To evaluate the proposed controller, two case studies i.e. two-area system and IEEE 39-bus system in the Matlab/Simulink platform have been studied. Using the proposed controller, the utilization of the communication network to send the control signal is significantly reduced, as shown through simulation results.
