PNNL

Abstract

Electricity infrastructure, as one of the most critical infrastructures in the U.S., plays an important role in modern societies. Its failure would lead to significant disruption of people’s lives, industry and commercial activities, and result in massive economic losses. Reliable operation of electricity infrastructure is an extremely challenging task because human operators need to consider thousands of possible configurations in near real-time to choose the best option and operate the network effectively. In today’s practice, electricity infrastructure operation is largely based on operators’ experience with very limited real-time decision support, resulting in inadequate management of complex predictions and the inability to anticipate, recognize, and respond to situations caused by human errors, natural disasters, or cyber attacks. Therefore, a systematic approach is needed to manage the complex operational paradigms and choose the best option in a near-real-time manner. This paper proposes an advanced decision support tool for electricity infrastructure operations. The tool has the functions of turning large amount of data into actionable information to help operators monitor power grid status in real time; performing trend analysis to indentify system trend at the regional level or system level to help the operator to foresee and discern emergencies, studying clustering analysis to assist operators to identify the relationships between system configurations and affected assets, and interactively evaluating the alternative remedial actions to aid operators to make effective and timely decisions. This tool can provide significant decision support on electricity infrastructure operations and lead to better reliability in power grids. This paper presents examples with actual electricity infrastructure data to demonstrate the capability of this tool.