Sparse Sensing Platform for Line-Outage Identification in Multiarea Power Systems

The outage of power lines, which causes unscheduled topology change, needs to be identified as fast as possible so that appropriate remedial actions are carried out accordingly. In this paper, a novel method for phasor measurement units (PMU) placement for identification of line outages in power grids is proposed. The proposed method is inspired by compressed sensing theory and is formulated as a linear binary integer programming problem that determines optimal number and locations of PMUs that should be installed to assure observability of the monitoring system. In the proposed monitoring system, only a subset of buses of the network needs to be monitored by PMUs, which significantly reduces the implementation cost. The proposed sparse sensing platform is applicable for large-scale multiarea transmission lines as the observability of the monitoring system is guaranteed by only using the data collected from PMUs inside the area of ownership of the associated independent system operator (ISO). This characteristic of the proposed monitoring system makes it attractive for application in large-scale transmission systems with different ISOs that are not willing/reluctant to share data.