Distributed Control and Communications for Grid Systems

A major problem of the grid system is identifying the source of abnormal behaviors. It is particularly important to identify the areas in which the grid system suffers from power deficiencies due to fault or voltage instability. Phasor Measurement Units (PMUs) are capable of measuring current and voltage amplitudes and phase angles, which can then be effectively used to monitor the power quality. This would require the support of a communication network to detect regions in the grid that may suffer from voltage instability. In this paper we present a distributed mapping technique that is based on a hierarchical network structure to identify the proximity of the grid instability for any possible remedial control action at the local level. For voltage monitoring, we also develop an average standard deviation measurement technique to access the power quality. We use the IEEE 34 bus grid distribution model and the IEEE 39 bus transmission model to assess the performance of the proposed techniques.