Feature Based Identification of Transmission Line Faults by Synchronous Monitoring of PMUs

Automated monitoring of power grids has become an important requirement in view of the complexity of such systems. Assertions are formal properties which define the admissible behaviors of the system and can be defined as the characterizing behavioral attributes under specific scenarios of the system. Though observability of the grid has increased with Phasor Measurement Units (PMUs), diagnosing the occurrence of various events in a grid is still not obvious from the data set of the PMUs and hence may require synchronous monitoring and analysis of a number of PMUs. In this work, we present an approach for localizing and classifying a transmission line fault in a grid using assertions defined over behaviors caused by that fault. The first step towards automating this task is to express the inadmissible behaviors in a formal way, and then to evaluate them over time-stamped data obtained from the PMUs of the grid. The outcome of the assertions obtained is finally used to localize and classify the transmission line fault that has occurred in the grid. The proposed methodology has been demonstrated on PMU data of the Indian power grid.