PMU-Based event localization technique for wide-area power system

This paper presents an online event location estimating process in a wide-area power system using the phasor measurement unit (PMU). For real-world applications of PMU-based event location estimation (ELE), it is necessary to consider the insufficiency of PMU data caused by a lack of PMUs, communication failure, PMU malfunction, etc., because insufficient PMU data cannot guarantee event observability over the entire network. To ensure possible event locations in a real-world system, an estimation method is developed by combining offline zonal analysis and an online ELE algorithm. The K-mean clustering method is utilized for electrical-bus clustering, which enables us to recognize separate electrical zones (EZs). Then, we propose a two-stage ELE algorithm by estimating the event EZ and localizing the specified event section within the estimated EZ. Proposed ELE algorithm is applied to a real-world PMU data collected from southwestern part of the United States. Finally, successful results from a real-world PMU data application are presented at the end of this paper.