Framework for Post-Facto Analysis of Wide-area Power System Disturbances and Events

After a major wide-area power system disturbance, a multitude of disturbance data is generated in the form of disturbance records, phasor data, sequence of events, etc. These collated datasets are processed by power system consultants or system operators to perform post-mortem analysis. The preliminary steps are filtering and labeling the data, obtaining derived quantities, aligning the asynchronous data, and segmenting the disturbance data to detect features that support the analysis. This paper presents the signal processing aspects of performing a generic post-mortem analysis. A user interface (UI) with semi-automatic stages is prepared around these developments. Though the UI tool was developed using Qt Designer and the versatile Python language for back-end scripting, the process is software-agnostic. Practical data from the 2020 Mumbai blackout is used for the illustration.