Wide-Area Event Identification in Power Systems: A Review of the State-of-the-Art

The proliferation of advanced metering devices such as phasor measurement units (PMUs) along with communication systems readiness has opened new horizons for centralized protection and control of power systems. Wide-area event identification (WAEI) is deemed an indispensable enabling block to these advanced applications. This paper is aimed at scrutinizing existing WAEI methods and discussing their prospects and shortcomings in improving situational awareness on complex power systems. The disturbances of interest are those that significantly impact system operation and stability, namely short-circuit faults, line outages, and generation outages. The reluctance of system operators to entrust WAEI methods is discussed and linked to the inability of these methods in dealing with real-world challenges such as communication latencies, temporarily incomplete network observability, and the loss of the time synchronization signal. The superimposed-circuit concept is detailed and promoted as a powerful methodology with great unleashed potential for addressing these problems. The paper ends with remarks on the research gaps that need to be addressed to fulfill the needs of power system operators, thus facilitating the uptake of WAEI methods in practice.