A Machine Learning based High-Speed State Estimator for Partially Observed Electric Transmission Systems

The accurate monitoring of the bulk transmission system of the electric power grid by sensors, such as Remote Terminal Units (RTUs) and Phasor Measurement Units (PMUs), is essential for maintaining the reliability of the modern power system. One of the primary objectives of power system monitoring is the identification of the snapshots of the system at regular intervals by performing state estimation using the available measurements from the sensors. The process of state estimation corresponds to the estimation of the complex voltages at all buses of the system. PMU measurements play an important role in this regard, because of the time-synchronized nature of these measurements as well as the faster rates at which they are produced. However, a model-based linear state estimator created using PMU-only data requires complete observability of the system by PMUs for its continuous functioning. The conventional model-based techniques also make certain assumptions in the modeling of the physical system, such as the constant values of the line parameters. The measurement error models in the conventional state estimators are also assumed to follow a Gaussian distribution. In this research, a data mining technique using Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) is proposed for performing a high-speed, time-synchronized state estimation of the transmission system of the power system. The proposed technique uses historical data to identify the correlation between the measurements and the system states as opposed to directly using the physical model of the system. Therefore, the highlight of the proposed technique is its ability to provide an accurate, fast, time-synchronized estimate of the system states even in the absence of complete system observability by PMUs.
The state estimator is formulated for the IEEE 118-bus system and its reliable performance is demonstrated in the presence of redundant observability, complete observability, and incomplete observability. The robustness of the state estimator is also demonstrated by performing the estimation in presence of Non-Gaussian measurement errors and varying line parameters. The consistency of the DNN state estimator is demonstrated by performing state estimation for an entire day.