Power systems are under increasing stress as deregulation introduces several new economic objectives for operation. Since power systems are being operated close to their limits, weak connections, unexpected events, hidden failures in protection system, human errors, and a host of other factors may cause a system to lose stability and even lead to catastrophic failure. Therefore, the need for improved system damping in a wider operating range is gaining more attention. Among the available damping control methods, each approach has advantages and disadvantages in different systems. The effectiveness of damping control depends on the devices chosen, the system modal feature, and the applied controller design method;In the literature, many approaches have been proposed to undertake this task. However, some of these approaches only take a fixed operating point into consideration without describing the changing uncertainty in varying system conditions; computational effort. Furthermore, no systematic comparison of controller design methods has been conducted with regard to different system profiles. Attention has been drawn to the enhanced susceptibility to inter-area oscillations between groups of machines under large others require a great deal of variation of system operating conditions. The linear parameter varying (LPV) approach, which has been widely studied in the literature, provides a potential method for capturing the varying system condition precisely without formulation of system uncertainty. However, in some cases no solution can be achieved if the system variation is too large using the traditional LPV approach. Also, sometimes the system structure imposes limitations in the achievable damping performance. In general, there is a critical need for a cost-effective control strategy applicable to different systems from an economic point of view;In this dissertation, a comprehensive comparison among controller design methods has been conducted to study the damping effectiveness of different FACTS devices. Based on these, a robust regional pole-placement method is applied in a TCSC damping controller design in a 4-machine system; an interpolated LPV approach is proposed and applied to designing a SVC damping controller in the IEEE 50-machine system; finally with the advantage of an additional feedback signal, limitations in achieving satisfactory damping performance can be relieved using a two-input single-output (TISO) damping controller for a TCSC in the IEEE 50-machine system
