LFC strategies for future power grids: A survey on intelligent, data-driven, and resilient techniques

Modern power systems face intensified frequency regulation challenges due to high renewable penetration, converter dominance, low inertia, cyber–physical vulnerabilities, and communication delays. Existing surveys seldom normalize hardware-in-the-loop practices or consistently report which practical nonlinearities — generation rate constraint, governor dead band, boiler/reheat dynamics, low-inertia converter effects, and communication delay — are included, limiting fair comparison and reproducibility. This review addresses these gaps by (i) introducing a reproducibility-oriented HIL protocol that specifies controller-in-the-loop and power-HIL usage, real-time constraints, and a concise reporting checklist; (ii) adopting a nonlinearity-first comparison that tags modeled nonidealities and separates computational burden into offline tuning or training and online runtime; and (iii) synthesizing cybersecurity for LFC under attack detection and identification, resilient control and mitigation, and secure communication and architecture. The result is a practice-oriented, comparable evidence base that clarifies method capabilities and limitations and guides the design of robust, efficient, and scalable frequency regulation for next-generation grids.