Distributed Asynchronous Algorithms & Software Systems For Wide-Area Monitoring of Power Systems

Abstract:

The objective of this NSF-CPS Synergy proposal is to develop a distributed algorithmic framework, supported by a highly fault-tolerant software system, for executing critical transmission-level operations of the North American power grid using gigantic volumes of Synchrophasor data. As the number of Phasor Measurement Units (PMU) increases to more than thousands in the next 4-5 years, it is rather intuitive that the current state-of-the-art centralized communication and information processing architecture of Wide-Area Measurement System (WAMS) will no longer be sustainable under such data-explosion, and a completely distributed cyber-physical architecture will need to be designed. Accordingly, our primary goal in this project is to develop parallel computational methods for solving real-time wide-area monitoring problems with analytical investigation of their stability, convergence and robustness properties, followed by their implementation and testing against extraneous malicious attacks using our WAMS-RTDS testbed at NC State. In particular, we will address three critical research problems, namely, wide-area oscillation monitoring, PMU-based transient stability assessment, and voltage stability monitoring.