Decentralized Control Synthesis in IBR-Dominated Power Systems: A Block Diagonal Dominance Based Approach

Integrating inverter-based resources (IBRs) from multiple vendors into power systems is challenging because their controllers are typically designed independently, with little coordination. To address this problem, this paper proposes a decentralized control synthesis framework for IBRs based on block-diagonal dominance (BDD) theory, which ensures the small-signal stability of multi-IBR power systems. By leveraging the grid frequency response, this approach enables a decentralized multi-input multi-output (MIMO) control design. Furthermore, the BDD-constrained design integrates a guaranteed minimum decay rate and defines a novel numerical metric to quantify the conservatism inherent in the decentralized stability certificate. The proposed control design with BDD constraints and minimum decay rate implementation is validated through a case study of the IEEE 9-bus test system.