Skip to main content
U.S. Department of Energy
Office of Scientific and Technical Information

Phasor Measurement Units Optimal Placement and Performance Limits for Fault Localization

Journal Article · · IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications
 [1];  [2];  [3];  [4];  [4];  [2];  [4]
  1. Invenia Labs., Cambridge (UK)
  2. Arizona State Univ., Tempe, AZ (United States). School of Electrical Computer and Energy Engineering
  3. Massachusetts Inst. of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, MA (United States). Sloan School of Management
  4. Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. (LBNL), Berkeley, CA (United States)
Here, the performance limits of faults localization are investigated using synchrophasor data. The focus is on a non-trivial operating regime where the number of Phasor Measurement Unit (PMU) sensors available is insufficient to have full observability of the grid state. Proposed analysis uses the Kullback Leibler (KL) divergence between the distributions corresponding to different fault location hypotheses associated with the observation model. This analysis shows that the most likely locations are concentrated in clusters of buses more tightly connected to the actual fault site akin to graph communities. Consequently, a PMU placement strategy is derived that achieves a near-optimal resolution for localizing faults for a given number of sensors. The problem is also analyzed from the perspective of sampling a graph signal, and how the placement of the PMUs i.e. the spatial sampling pattern and the topological characteristic of the grid affect the ability to successfully localize faults. To highlight the superior performance of presented fault localization and placement algorithms, the proposed strategy is applied to a modified IEEE 34, IEEE-123 bus test cases and to data from a real distribution grid. Additionally, the detection of cyber-physical attacks is also examined where PMU data and relevant Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) network traffic information are compared to determine if a network breach has affected the integrity of the system information and/or operations.
Research Organization:
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), Berkeley, CA (United States)
Sponsoring Organization:
USDOE Office of Cybersecurity, Energy Security, and Emergency Response (CESER); USDOE Office of Science (SC)
Grant/Contract Number:
AC02-05CH11231; OE0000780
OSTI ID:
1637305
Journal Information:
IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications, Journal Name: IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications Journal Issue: 1 Vol. 38; ISSN 0733-8716
Publisher:
IEEECopyright Statement
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English

Similar Records

Power system observability with minimal phasor measurement placement
Journal Article · Sat May 01 00:00:00 EDT 1993 · IEEE Transactions on Power Systems (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers); (United States) · OSTI ID:6002913

Low-Resolution Fault Localization Using Phasor Measurement Units with Community Detection
Conference · Mon Oct 01 00:00:00 EDT 2018 · 2018 IEEE International Conference on Communications, Control, and Computing Technologies for Smart Grids, SmartGridComm 2018 · OSTI ID:1608264

A two-phase investment model for optimal allocation of phasor measurement units considering transmission switching
Journal Article · Sat Jan 31 23:00:00 EST 2015 · Electric Power Systems Research · OSTI ID:1392409