Location Identification of Power Line Outages Using PMU Measurements with Bad Data

TL;DR

This paper presents a novel method for identifying multiple power line outages using PMU measurements that can handle bad data caused by communication errors or system faults, without prior knowledge of outage count or noise levels.

Contribution

It introduces an algorithm that simultaneously detects line outages and recovers faulty measurements without needing prior outage or noise information.

Findings

Effective in identifying multiple outages with bad data

No prior outage count or noise variance needed

Validated on various test systems

Abstract

The use of phasor angle measurements provided by phasor measurement units (PMUs) in fault detection is regarded as a promising method in identifying locations of power line outages. However, communication errors or system malfunctions may introduce errors to the measurements and thus yield bad data. Most of the existing methods on line outage identification fail to consider such error. This paper develops a framework for identifying multiple power line outages based on the PMUs' measurements in the presence of bad data. In particular, we design an algorithm to identify locations of line outage and recover the faulty measurements simultaneously. The proposed algorithm does not require any prior information on the number of line outages and the noise variance. Case studies carried out on test systems of different sizes validate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed approach.