A White-Box Decision Tree-Based Preventive Strategy for Real-Time Islanding Detection Using Wide-Area Phasor Measurement

With the ever-increasing energy demand and enormous development of generation capacity, modern bulk power systems are mostly pushed to operate with narrower security boundaries. Therefore, timely and reliable assessment of power system security is an inevitable necessity to prevent widespread blackouts and cascading outages. In this paper, a new white-box decision tree-based preventive strategy is presented to evaluate and enhance the power system dynamic security versus the credible N-K contingencies originating from transient instabilities. As well, a competent operating measure is expertly defined to detect and identify the islanding and non-islanding conditions with the aid of a wide-area phasor measurement system. The newly developed strategy is outlined by a three-level simulation with the aim of guaranteeing the power system dynamic security. In the first-level, six hundred islanding and non-islanding scenarios are generated using an enhanced version of the ID3 algorithm, referred to as the C4.5 algorithms. In the second-level, optimal C4.5 decision trees are offline trained based on operating parameters achieved by the reduction error pruning method. In the third level, however, all trained decision trees are rigorously investigated offline and online; and then, the most accurate and reliable decision tree is selected. The newly developed strategy is examined on the IEEE New England 39-bus test system, and its effectiveness is assured by simulation studies.