PNNL

Abstract

The Wide Area Measurement System (WAMS) is a key enabler of real-time monitoring of power grids. In WAMS design, the essential goals are fast and resilient data transfer from phasor measurement units (PMU) to the phasor data concentrator (PDC). We propose a scalable PDC placement technique for minimizing the end-to-end delay while maintaining resiliency, by minimizing the average hop and the maximum hop paths among the installed PMUs and the PDCs. The proposed technique constitutes two stages. In the prescreening stage, the plausible candidates of PDC configurations are identified based on a graph theory-based multi-median function (MMF). In order to scale the MMF process, a computationally efficient meta-heuristic algorithm is used. In the candidate selection stage, two different heuristics, namely Suurballe’s and Dijkstra’s algorithms, are employed to identify the best of those plausible PDC configurations as the final design. This technique not only minimizes the hop paths between PMUs and the PDCs, but also ensures the resiliency of the network against single PMU, PDC, or communication link failure by incorporating the roles of PMUs in power grid observability into the routing policy. Simulation results on the IEEE 57-bus test power system and the 2000-bus test power system demonstrate the effectiveness and scalability of the proposed technique.