  The European Economic Area Electricity Network Benchmark (EEA-ENB) is a
multi-area power system representing the European network of transmission
systems for electricity to facilitate the application of distributed control
techniques. In the EEA-ENB we consider the Load Frequency Control (LFC) problem
in the presence of renewable energy sources (RESs), and energy storage systems
(ESSs). RESs are known to cause instability in power networks due to their
inertia-less and intermittent characteristics, while ESSs are introduced as a
resource to mitigate the problem. In the EEA-ENB, particular attention is
dedicated to Distributed Model Predictive Control (DMPC), whose application is
often limited to small and homogeneous test cases due to the lack of
standardized large-scale scenarios for testing, and due to the large
computation time required to obtain a centralized MPC action for performance
comparison with DMPC strategies under consideration. The second problem is
exacerbated when the scale of the system grows. To address these challenges and
to provide a real-world-based and control-independent benchmark, the EEA-ENB
has been developed. The benchmark includes a centralized MPC strategy providing
performance and computation time metrics to compare distributed control within
a repeatable and realistic simulation environment.
