Babji Srinivasan

Smart grids integrate computing and communication infrastructure with conventional power grids to improve situational awareness, control, and safety. Several technologies such as automatic fault detection, automated reconfiguration, and outage management require close network monitoring. Therefore, utilities utilize sensing equipment such as PMUs (phasor measurement units), smart meters, and bellwether meters to obtain grid measurements. However, the expansion in sensing equipment results in an increased strain on existing communication infrastructure. Prior works overcome this problem by exploiting the sparsity of power consumption data in the Haar, Hankel, and Toeplitz transformation bases to achieve sub-Nyquist compression. However, data-driven dictionaries enable superior compression ratios and reconstruction accuracy by learning the sparsifying basis. Therefore, this work proposes using dictionary learning to learn the sparsifying basis of smart meter data. The smart meter data sent to the data centers are compressed using a random projection matrix prior to transmission. These measurements are aggregated to obtain the compressed measurements at the primary nodes. Compressive sensing-based estimators are then utilized to estimate the system states. This approach was validated on the IEEE 33-node distribution system and showed superior reconstruction accuracy over conventional transformation bases and over-complete dictionaries. Voltage magnitude and angle estimation error less than 0.3% mean absolute percentage error and 0.04 degree mean absolute error, respectively, were achieved at compression ratios as high as eight.

Cyberinfrastructure (e.g., sensors, actuators and the associated communication network) has become an integral part of our modern power grid. While these cyber technologies enhance situational awareness and operational efficiency, they also expose the physical system to cyber-attacks. In this paper, we consider the problem of transmission system state estimation based on measurements from a number of PMUs. In this context, a PMU data integrity attack, Man-in-the-Middle (MitM) attack that can potentially cause a severe impact on the grid is analyzed. Specifically, we propose a novel method based on an alternate expectation-maximization framework to mitigate the effects of these attacks on the state estimation process. Numerical tests are conducted on IEEE-14, 30 and 118 bus systems with different attack scenarios to validate the developed method. Unlike existing works, the proposed algorithm provides accurate state estimates without any prior knowledge of the location of the attack or the number of meters being attacked.

Grid state estimation is essential for effective control and management of distribution systems. While weighted least squares has been the conventional method for state estimation, sparsity-aware methods have become popular due to their superior performance with limited data. Matrix completion and compressed sensing-based state estimation approaches exploit the underlying smoothness in the state variables. However, classic matrix completion methods do not take into account the temporal correlation of system states. Compressed sensing methods, on the other hand, require an appropriate choice of sparsifying basis that may not be easy to identify. This article proposes a block tensor completion based framework which uses an alternative approach to estimate voltage phasor, power injections, and branch currents. This approach utilizes the temporal correlation of the system states in a tensor trace-norm minimization formulation with power flow equations as constraints. Feature scaling is introduced in the problem formulation to benefit from the improved sensitivity of the tensor trace norm to the matrix columns in the scaled unfoldings of the tensor. Weighted tensor norm is utilized to exploit the structures of the different unfoldings of the state measurement tensor to improve the voltage estimation. The estimation accuracy is further improved by alternatively estimating the tensor columns and increasing the available data at each stage in the tensor completion process. The proposed methods are evaluated on the IEEE-33, 37 test systems, and a 100-node test system. The proposed methods are shown to provide significant performance gains relative to the classic matrix and tensor completion based approaches.