Grainger CEME

Xichen Jiang with adviser A. Domínguez-García
Fast and reliable line outage detection for power system transmission line outages is crucial for maintaining reliability in the power grid. Current methods to detect these line outages rely on a system model obtained offline. This can be inaccurate due to bad historical or telemetry data. We propose a model-free statistical algorithm for detecting line outages and show that it has better performance than other schemes. Our algorithm is based on the cumulative sum (CuSum) test from the quickest-change detection literature. It exploits the statistical properties of the measured voltage phase angles before, during, and after a line outage, whereas other methods only utilize the change in statistics that occurs at the instant of outage. We also devise a method to optimally set the thresholds for the CuSum algorithm so that for a fixed false alarm rate, detection delay is minimized. Simulations are performed on the IEEE 14-bus system, shown as a one-line diagram in Figure 28. Figure 29 presents a comparison of various statistical detection schemes for line outages. For a given false-alarm rate, our proposed algorithm performs better than others. This research is funded by NSF.

Figure 28: IEEE 14-bus system

Figure 29: ILine outage comparison