Abstract Recent system wide disturbances have demonstrated the need for automatic system protection schemes to prevent such cascading disturbances. In this paper, an adaptive under-voltage load shedding scheme using model predictive control is proposed to protect power system against voltage instability. The proposed scheme calculates the criticality of the system based on the measurements of voltage magnitudes and reactive power generations and then in case of voltage instability a model predictive based step-sized load shedding scheme will be triggered. The speed and amount of load shedding steps are adapted to the severity of contingency in the affected region. By devising the grid into the separate regions the proposed scheme acts as a distributed controller without having a central dispatching center. The performance of the proposed model predictive based scheme is verified over a 10-bus dynamic test case. The proposed model predictive control will be solved using sequential quadratic programming technique.