  This paper presents a new phasor measurement unit (PMU)-based wide-area
damping control (WADC) method to suppress the critical inter-area modes of
large-scale power systems. Modal participation factors, estimated by a
practically model-free system identification approach, are used to select the
most suitable synchronous generators for control through the proposed WADC
algorithm. It is shown that multiple inter-area modes can be sufficiently
damped by the proposed approach without affecting the rest of the modes, while
only a few machines are needed to perform the control. The proposed technique
is applied to the IEEE 68-bus and the IEEE 145-bus systems, including the test
cases with PMU measurement noise and with missing PMUs. The simulation results
clearly demonstrate the good adaptivity of the control strategy subjected to
network model changes, its effective damping performance comparing to power
system stabilizers (PSSs), and its great potential for near real-time
implementation.
