Paul Hines

Samuel Chevalier, Paul D. H. Hines

With the continued deployment of synchronized Phasor Measurement Units (PMUs), high sample rate data are rapidly increasing the real time observability of power systems. Prior research has shown that the statistics of these data can provide useful information regarding network stability, but it is not yet known how this statistical information can be actionably used to improve power system stability. To address this issue, this paper presents a method that gauges and improves the voltage stability of a system using the statistics present in PMU data streams. Leveraging an analytical solver to determine a range of "critical" bus voltage variances, the presented methods monitor raw statistical data in an observable load pocket to determine when control actions are needed to mitigate the risk of voltage collapse. A simple reactive power controller is then implemented, which acts dynamically to maintain an acceptable voltage stability margin within the system. Time domain simulations on 3-bus and 39-bus test cases demonstrate that the resulting statistical controller can out-perform more conventional feedback control systems by maintaining voltage stability margins while loads simultaneously increase and fluctuate.

Mark D. Wagy, Josh C. Bongard, James P. Bagrow et al.

Crowdsourcing has been successfully applied in many domains including astronomy, cryptography and biology. In order to test its potential for useful application in a Smart Grid context, this paper investigates the extent to which a crowd can contribute predictive hypotheses to a model of residential electric energy consumption. In this experiment, the crowd generated hypotheses about factors that make one home different from another in terms of monthly energy usage. To implement this concept, we deployed a web-based system within which 627 residential electricity customers posed 632 questions that they thought predictive of energy usage. While this occurred, the same group provided 110,573 answers to these questions as they accumulated. Thus users both suggested the hypotheses that drive a predictive model and provided the data upon which the model is built. We used the resulting question and answer data to build a predictive model of monthly electric energy consumption, using random forest regression. Because of the sparse nature of the answer data, careful statistical work was needed to ensure that these models are valid. The results indicate that the crowd can generate useful hypotheses, despite the sparse nature of the dataset.

Thomas C. McAndrew, Joshua C. Bongard, Christopher M. Danforth et al.

Identifying and communicating relationships between causes and effects is important for understanding our world, but is affected by language structure, cognitive and emotional biases, and the properties of the communication medium. Despite the increasing importance of social media, much remains unknown about causal statements made online. To study real-world causal attribution, we extract a large-scale corpus of causal statements made on the Twitter social network platform as well as a comparable random control corpus. We compare causal and control statements using statistical language and sentiment analysis tools. We find that causal statements have a number of significant lexical and grammatical differences compared with controls and tend to be more negative in sentiment than controls. Causal statements made online tend to focus on news and current events, medicine and health, or interpersonal relationships, as shown by topic models. By quantifying the features and potential biases of causality communication, this study improves our understanding of the accuracy of information and opinions found online.

Saurav Acharya, Byung Suk Lee, Paul Hines

This paper addresses the problem of predicting the k events that are most likely to occur next, over historical real-time event streams. Existing approaches to causal prediction queries have a number of limitations. First, they exhaustively search over an acyclic causal network to find the most likely k effect events; however, data from real event streams frequently reflect cyclic causality. Second, they contain conservative assumptions intended to exclude all possible non-causal links in the causal network; it leads to the omission of many less-frequent but important causal links. We overcome these limitations by proposing a novel event precedence model and a run-time causal inference mechanism. The event precedence model constructs a first order absorbing Markov chain incrementally over event streams, where an edge between two events signifies a temporal precedence relationship between them, which is a necessary condition for causality. Then, the run-time causal inference mechanism learns causal relationships dynamically during query processing. This is done by removing some of the temporal precedence relationships that do not exhibit causality in the presence of other events in the event precedence model. This paper presents two query processing algorithms -- one performs exhaustive search on the model and the other performs a more efficient reduced search with early termination. Experiments using two real datasets (cascading blackouts in power systems and web page views) verify the effectiveness of the probabilistic top-k prediction queries and the efficiency of the algorithms. Specifically, the reduced search algorithm reduced runtime, relative to exhaustive search, by 25-80% (depending on the application) with only a small reduction in accuracy.

Paul D. H. Hines, Seth Blumsack, Markus Schläpfer

While many large infrastructure networks, such as power, water, and natural gas systems, have similar physical properties governing flows, these systems tend to have distinctly different sizes and topological structures. This paper seeks to understand how these different size-scales and topological features can emerge from relatively simple design principles. Specifically, we seek to describe the conditions under which it is optimal to build decentralized network infrastructures, such as a microgrid, rather than centralized ones, such as a large high-voltage power system. While our method is simple it is useful in explaining why sometimes, but not always, it is economical to build large, interconnected networks and in other cases it is preferable to use smaller, distributed systems. The results indicate that there is not a single set of infrastructure cost conditions under which optimally-designed networks will have highly centralized architectures. Instead, as costs increase we find that average network sizes increase gradually according to a power-law. When we consider the reliability costs, however, we do observe a transition point at which optimally designed networks become more centralized with larger geographic scope. As the losses associated with node and edge failures become more costly, this transition becomes more sudden.