Emma Stewart

Mahdi Jamei, Anna Scaglione, Ciaran Roberts et al.

The impact of Phasor Measurement Units (PMUs) for providing situational awareness to transmission system operators has been widely documented. Micro-PMUs ($μ$PMUs) are an emerging sensing technology that can provide similar benefits to Distribution System Operators (DSOs), enabling a level of visibility into the distribution grid that was previously unattainable. In order to support the deployment of these high resolution sensors, the automation of data analysis and prioritizing communication to the DSO becomes crucial. In this paper, we explore the use of $μ$PMUs to detect anomalies on the distribution grid. Our methodology is motivated by growing concern about failures and attacks to distribution automation equipment. The effectiveness of our approach is demonstrated through both real and simulated data.

Armin Aligholian, Alireza Shahsavari, Emma Stewart et al.

Distribution-level phasor measurement units, a.k.a, micro-PMUs, report a large volume of high resolution phasor measurements which constitute a variety of event signatures of different phenomena that occur all across power distribution feeders. In order to implement an event-based analysis that has useful applications for the utility operator, one needs to extract these events from a large volume of micro-PMU data. However, due to the infrequent, unscheduled, and unknown nature of the events, it is often a challenge to even figure out what kind of events are out there to capture and scrutinize. In this paper, we seek to address this open problem by developing an unsupervised approach, which requires minimal prior human knowledge. First, we develop an unsupervised event detection method based on the concept of Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN). It works by training deep neural networks that learn the characteristics of the normal trends in micro-PMU measurements; and accordingly detect an event when there is any abnormality. We also propose a two-step unsupervised clustering method, based on a novel linear mixed integer programming formulation. It helps us categorize events based on their origin in the first step and their similarity in the second step. The active nature of the proposed clustering method makes it capable of identifying new clusters of events on an ongoing basis. The proposed unsupervised event detection and clustering methods are applied to real-world micro-PMU data. Results show that they can outperform the prevalent methods in the literature. These methods also facilitate our further analysis to identify important clusters of events that lead to unmasking several use cases that could be of value to the utility operator.

Armin Aligholian, Alireza Shahsavari, Ed Cortez et al.

A new data-driven method is proposed to detect events in the data streams from distribution-level phasor measurement units, a.k.a., micro-PMUs. The proposed method is developed by constructing unsupervised deep learning anomaly detection models; thus, providing event detection algorithms that require no or minimal human knowledge. First, we develop the core components of our approach based on a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) model. We refer to this method as the basic method. It uses the same features that are often used in the literature to detect events in micro-PMU data. Next, we propose a second method, which we refer to as the enhanced method, which is enforced with additional feature analysis. Both methods can detect point signatures on single features and also group signatures on multiple features. This capability can address the unbalanced nature of power distribution circuits. The proposed methods are evaluated using real-world micro-PMU data. We show that both methods highly outperform a state-of-the-art statistical method in terms of the event detection accuracy. The enhanced method also outperforms the basic method.

Mahdi Jamei, Anna Scaglione, Ciaran Roberts et al.

As the distribution grid moves toward a tightly-monitored network, it is important to automate the analysis of the enormous amount of data produced by the sensors to increase the operators situational awareness about the system. In this paper, focusing on Micro-Phasor Measurement Unit ($μ$PMU) data, we propose a hierarchical architecture for monitoring the grid and establish a set of analytics and sensor fusion primitives for the detection of abnormal behavior in the control perimeter. Due to the key role of the $μ$PMU devices in our architecture, a source-constrained optimal $μ$PMU placement is also described that finds the best location of the devices with respect to our rules. The effectiveness of the proposed methods are tested through the synthetic and real $μ$PMU data.