Power Systems Topology and State Estimation by Graph Blind Source Separation

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel approach to jointly estimate power system topology and states using graph blind source separation, leveraging maximum likelihood estimation and low-complexity algorithms, with performance close to theoretical bounds.

Contribution

It formulates the topology and state estimation as a graph BSS problem and develops practical low-complexity methods with theoretical performance guarantees.

Findings

ML-BEST achieves near-oracle state estimation performance.

Proposed methods accurately recover topology with low complexity.

Topology estimation MSE approaches the Cramer-Rao bound.

Abstract

In this paper, we consider the problem of blind estimation of states and topology (BEST) in power systems. We use the linearized DC model of real power measurements with unknown voltage phases (i.e. states) and an unknown admittance matrix (i.e. topology) and show that the BEST problem can be formulated as a blind source separation (BSS) problem with a weighted Laplacian mixing matrix. We develop the constrained maximum likelihood (ML) estimator of the Laplacian matrix for this graph BSS (GBSS) problem with Gaussian-distributed states. The ML-BEST is shown to be only a function of the states second-order statistics. Since the topology recovery stage of the ML-BEST approach results in a high-complexity optimization problem, we propose two low-complexity methods to implement it 1) Two- phase topology recovery, which is based on solving the relaxed convex optimization and then finding the closest Laplacian matrix, and 2) Augmented Lagrangian topology recovery. We derive a closed-form expression for the associated Cramer-Rao bound (CRB) on the topology matrix estimation. The performance of the proposed methods is evaluated for the IEEE-14 bus test-case system and for a random network. It is shown that, asymptotically, the state estimation performance of the proposed ML-BEST methods coincides with the oracles minimum mean-squared-error (MSE) state estimator, and the MSE of the topology estimation achieves the proposed CRB.