Award Abstract # 1544645
CPS: Breakthrough: Collaborative Research: WARP: Wide Area assisted Resilient Protection

NSF Org: CNS
Division Of Computer and Network Systems
Recipient: NEW MEXICO STATE UNIVERSITY
Initial Amendment Date: September 16, 2015
Latest Amendment Date: September 16, 2015
Award Number: 1544645
Award Instrument: Standard Grant
Program Manager: David Corman
CNS
 Division Of Computer and Network Systems
CSE
 Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering
Start Date: September 15, 2015
End Date: November 30, 2018 (Estimated)
Total Intended Award Amount: $182,294.00
Total Awarded Amount to Date: $182,294.00
Funds Obligated to Date: FY 2015 = $100,603.00
History of Investigator:
  • Sukumar Brahma (Principal Investigator)
    sbrahma@clemson.edu
Recipient Sponsored Research Office: New Mexico State University
1050 STEWART ST.
LAS CRUCES
NM  US  88003
(575)646-1590
Sponsor Congressional District: 02
Primary Place of Performance: New Mexico State University
1125, Frenger Mall
Las Cruces
NM  US  88003-8001
Primary Place of Performance
Congressional District:
02
Unique Entity Identifier (UEI): J3M5GZAT8N85
Parent UEI:
NSF Program(s): CPS-Cyber-Physical Systems
Primary Program Source: 01001516DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT
Program Reference Code(s): 7918, 8234, 9150
Program Element Code(s): 791800
Award Agency Code: 4900
Fund Agency Code: 4900
Assistance Listing Number(s): 47.070

ABSTRACT

The electric power grid experiences disturbances all the time that are routinely controlled, managed, or eliminated by system protection measures- designed by careful engineering studies and fine-tuned by condensing years of operational experience. Despite this, the grid sometimes experiences disruptive events that can quickly, and somewhat unstoppably catapult the system towards a blackout. Arresting such blackouts has remained elusive - mainly because relays (protection devices) operate on local data, and are prone to hidden faults that are impossible to detect until they manifest, resulting in misoperations that have sometime been precipitators or contributors to blackouts. Inspired by the Presidential policy directive on resilience -- meaning the ability to anticipate, prepare, withstand, and recover from disruptive events, this project proposes "WARP: Wide Area assisted Resilient Protection", a paradigm that adds a layer of finer (supervisory) intelligence to supplement conventional protection wisdom - which we call resilient protection. Exploiting high fidelity measurements and computation to calculate and analyze energy function components of power systems to identify disturbances, WARP would allow relays to be supervised - correct operations would be corroborated, and misoperations will be remedied by judiciously reversing the relay operation in a rational time-frame. The project also envisions predicting instability using advanced estimation techniques, thus being proactive. This will provide power grid the ability to auto-correct and bounce back from misoperations, curtailing the size, scale and progression of blackouts and improving the robustness and resilience of the electric grid -- our nation's most critical infrastructure.

In WARP, disruptive events are deciphered by using synchrophasor data, energy functions, and dynamic state information via particle filtering. The information is fused to provide a global data set and intelligence signal that supervises relays, and also to predict system stability. Resilience is achieved when the supervisory signal rectifies the misoperation of relays, or endorses their action when valid. This endows relays with post-event-auto-correct abilities 
- a feature that never been explored/understood in the protection-stability nexus. Architectures to study the effect of latency and bad data are proposed. WARP introduces new notions: global detectability and distinguishability for power system events, stability prediction based on
the sensitivity of the energy function components and uses a novel factorization method: (CUR) preserving data interpretability to reduce data dimensionality. All the proposed
tools will be wrapped into a simulation framework to assess scalability and accuracy-runtime tradeoffs, and quantify the degree of resilience achieved. The effectiveness of the proposed scheme during extreme events will be measured by reenacting two well-documented blackout sequences. In addition, simulations on benchmarked systems will be performed to assess scalability and accuracy-runtime tradeoffs, and quantify the degree of resilience achieved.

PUBLICATIONS PRODUCED AS A RESULT OF THIS RESEARCH

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S. Brahma, R. Kavasseri, Huiping Cao, N. R. Chaudhuri, T. Alexopoulos, and Y. Cui "Real Time Identification of Dynamic Events in Power Systems using PMU data, and Potential Applications - Models, Promises, and Challenges" IEEE Trans. Power Delivery ? Special Issue on Innovative Research Concepts for Power Delivery Engineering , v.32 , 2017 , p.294 10.1109/TPWRD.2016.2590961
Yinan Cui, Rajesh Kavasseri, and Sukumar Brahma "Dynamic State Estimation Assisted Out-of-StepDetection for Generators Using Angular Difference" IEEE Trans. Power Delivery , v.32 , 2017 10.1109/TPWRD.2016.2615594
Yinan Cui, Rajesh Kavasseri, Sukumar Brahma "Dynamic State Estimation Assisted Posturing for Generator Out-of-step Protection" Proc. IEEE PES General Meeting 2016 , v.00 , 2016 10.1109/PESGM.2016.7741957

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