1112 IEEE Transactions on

Real-Time Security Assessment of Electrical

C.G. Groom, K.W. Chan, R.W. Dum and A.R. Da

Power and Energy Systems Research Group,
School of Electronic and Electrical Engineering,
University of Bath, Bath BA2 7AY, UK

Abstract - A new fast approach to electricalpower network analysis and Data Acquisition (SC
is presented in this paper. A description of a real-time multimachine throughout the power net
power system simulator, developed at the University of Bath, wiu the control centre.
be given, which has been used rather than the more conventional
fast decoupledload flow. The operation of the algorithms that have
been developed as part of this simulator will be described,together
with an explanation of how fuzzy set theory has been used for
contingency screening and analysis, as well as the identification of
system transient and dynamicinstability. Results are presented for
these fuzzy algorithms and compared with traditional numerical
methods for the IEEE 57 bus systemand a redwedBritish National
Grid network. Finally, conclusions are drawn in the light of these
results, illustrating the benefits that can be achieved with respect
to accuracy and computational speed.

I. INTRODUCTION

One of the main concerns in the operation of a power

system is its security. The ultimate goal is to continuouslyfulfill
the load requirements, i.e. the generation-loadbalance, without
violating the operational constraints (use of transmission equip-
ment within its associated permissibl limits). Predominately, pve
been run
the reasons for these violations are U ally associated with &e mferactiw modes.
forced outages of generators and transmission equipment.
The operation of a power system can, essentially, be
broken down into three main sets of constraints, namely load,
operating and security limits. The concept of the f m t two is well
establishedand can be used to define a security constraint. Thus
system security [11is the capability of the system to withstand a
set of credible disturbancesor contingencies(unplannedoutages,
which include busbar faults, load and generator losses and
transmission lines trips), without violating theload and operating
constraints in the remaining system.
This operational function is carried out in one form or an-
other by digital computers. These may be stand-alone machines,
such as personal computers or work stations, or mainframe-
based calculation engines linked to the Energy Management
System (EMS). The introduction of the Supervisory Control
A number of re
95 SM 609-8 PWRS A paper recommended and approved
by the IEEE Power System Engineering Committee of the
IEEE Power Engineerins Society for preaentation se
the 1995 IEEE/PES Summer Meeting, July 23-27, 1 9 9 5 ,
Portland, OR. Manuscript submitted December 1 4 , 1994;
made available for printing June 20, 1995.

by an equivalent 7c circuit that models e

0885-8950/96/$05.00 0 1995 IEEE

 1113
transmission lines or power transformers. Before any Contingencies are applied, the pre-contingent
Text files are used to define machine and network para- system state is remembered, so that the network can be restored
meters as well as the initial steady-state conditions of the power to its original operating condition at the end of each contingency
system model. The user can change most of these paramet- evaluation.
ers on-line to simulate events such as line outages, cleared or
uncleared balanced %phase busbar faults and generator trips. Read in a contingency
These can be applied either interactively or as a timed sequence from the database
of individual events and, with the use of a data-logging facility,
machine and network states can be stored for a user-defined ‘ - I
time duration in memory. These stored states can be transferred
to files under user control or plotted to the screen. L
]Rememberpre-contingent state

Most of the simulators that have been developed support

two display monitors. One provides textual information, whilst
the other provides graphical support. In addition to the graph
c 4
Callcontin ency
Application iobutine
+

r
plots mentioned above, a number of static (used for tutorials) 4
and animated displays (used to dynamically follow the current Wait for severity indices and
state of simulation) can be shown. alarms for contingency to
A graphical man-machine user interface for PowSim has be allocated in memory
also been developed using X-Windows. A set of low level
graphics routines have been written which use two display
pages to provide flicker-free dynamic pictures which allow dy-
namic real-time diagrams to be displayed whilst simultaneously
supporting the X-Windows facilities. /
<-More
A contingencies>7
Yes

ID.SECURITY ASSESSMENT STRUCTURE

Rank contingenciesin
The power system simulator P o w S i described in the reverse order of seven@
previous section has been used as the basis for the security
assessor. All computing code for the simulator and the system Print out results from
analysis software was written in ANSI standard C programming
language in order to retain compatibility and portability between
different hardware platforms.

A. Overview of Security Assessmenthop

The source code that allows the interaction (described
in the previous section) was used as the basis for applying
contingencies, i.e. busbar faults, line outages, etc ... This code
is split into “command modules” which are called by the user
via the man-machine interface to carry out the modifications
to the operating point of the simulator. An additional module
has been written which reads all the credible disturbances in
a user-specified database and calls the appropriate routines to
conduct contingency application and analysis. The procedure
involved is summarised by Fig. 1.
This database contains single and multiple circuit trans-
mission line outages, busbar faults, load losses and generator
trips and the user specified time periods for contingency screen-
ing, analysis and any further stability assessment that may be
required for dynamic instability cases. Fault duration for busbar
contingencies are also specified in this database.
For each contingency read in, a check is carried out to see
whether it is a valid proposal, i.e. if a particular busbar specified
in the database is in fact in the network model. If it passes
this check, all performance indices and networkhtability alarm
flags are set to initial nominal vahes before the contingency is
applied. In the particular case of line outages, a local or remote
end flag is also set to specify which end of the transmission
line is to be tripped first. If a contingency contains the keyword
“and” in the database, a multiple outage has been specified.
I Return back to operator
“interactive environment” I
Fig. 1. Main contingency application and analysis loop
The outages listed in the database can then be passed to the
application code, the data transferred includes contingencytype
and name together with the screening, analysis, fault duration
and dynamic stability assessment time periods Specified in the
database.
B. Application Routine
From the mairi loop in Fig. 1, function calls are made to
the Contingency Application Routine. If the example of a line
outage is used, it can be seen from Fig. 2 that there are a number
of operations assoc:iated with this routine. Alarm logging for
both network and itransient stability violations (which will be
described in a later section) and contingency screening are star-
ted simultaneously and call routines from the main simulator
(PowSim) loop whilch invokes the network and machine calcu-
lations. A SCREEN flag is set to TRUE whilst the simulator
is screening the cointingencies for subsequent processing. The
1114

time period for this screening interval is specified by the user in

the database and for this research it was found that one second
proved to be adequate.

Start contingency rocessing c Busbar load 10s

1~ Contingency Anagsis Routine
for h e s , busbars and groups stored and set to
4
Take out conhngency line,
busbadload or group and start
alarm processmg. nected from the r
1

L Wait for screenmg enod to fmsh

and set SClZEEN 8ag to FALSE

analysis software and st

I ’ I stabilityviolations for subs
If m y contingencies p

Confinue for additional

stablllty analysls penod
I
End alarm processing and store system
& stability violabons with conhngency<
type, name and severity index ( S Q

Return for next coutmgency from

Main Contingency Loop

Fig 2. Contingency application routine

During this interval, the fuzzy Contingency Analysis

Routines are called which start processing the data corning
from the simulator immediately after the fault has been applied.
These will continue in their operation until terminated by the
contingency. C. Analysis Algonthm
In the case of line contingencies, in addition to the line
name (or names, for multiple outages), the side which is to
have primary tripping is also passed. The local end busbar of address the areas of cont
the line is tripped with a 3-phase fault of 8Oms duration and
the fault impedance to ground from that busbar is set to m o ,
i.e. disconnecting the line from that busbar. The remote end is
tripped at the same time as the sending end but with a longer
hase fault and a fault i ce to ground equivalent
edance of that line, e remote end still “sees”
the line in service. Once the e remote end has been the steady state values at
cleared (40ms after the sending end), the line is completely are monitored throu
removed from the network. This is an example of a single line
contingency with the local end tripped frst. The
is similar for primary remote end tripping and can
 1115

nodal reactive power injections (MVAr). Fig. 3 outlines the from its normalised value and the classification triangle para-
basic procedure. meters into which it falls. It is from this that the membership
Each quantity is normalised with respect to its operating function can be Calculated.
limits and then classified into one of five fuzzy linguistic If a number of contingent quantities fall into a particular
variables, i.e. Very Small (VS), Small (S), Medium (M),Large linguistic variable, tlhe membership function of that variable is
(L)and Very Large (a). modified or enhanced by the use of fuzzy-set operations [3].
To quantify these linguistic variables, a performance index These operations include the “intersection” and “product” of
(PI) is used to describe the relative severity of each variable, i.e. the fuzzy sets, so that the peak value of the triangle increases
a higher PI indicates a greater chance of large limit violations. illustrating the dominance of that linguistic variable. For ex-
The membership functions p of these linguistic variables have ample, for a post-contingent condition, the final shape of the p
been represented by triangles and, hence, can be described by vs PI curve can be quite different to that of Fig. 4.
three parameters, its centre (C) (the most likely value of the PI
for the variable), its width (W) (the degree of uncertainty about
the PI) and its peak value (P) (the strength of the variable). By
using a sigmoidfunction as in Fig. 4to weight these membership
functions, more emphasis has been placed on the Medium to
Very Large range, since this is ultimately of greater interest than
the Very Small to Medium region.
1.0

0.8
i VL

0.6

0.4

0.2

i I Normalisevalues I j 200 400 600 800 1000

Fig. 4. 1-1 vs PI using a Sigmoid Weighting Function

Once all the triangles have been modified at the end of

Calculate grade of membership 1-1
:I , 1 , j
Calculate area undereach
membership function (in this
case bnangular form)
I
I
Calculate total area under
I all these triangles
the contingency application, it is necessaxy to “defuzzify” the
membership functions to yield the overall system performance
index for that particular contingent quantity. A “centre-of-
gravity” via a binary search procedure (along the PI axis)
has been employed for this purpose. The indices for each
contingent quantity ,we then summed together to give the total
system severity ind~ex(SI). This number is then stored with
its associated network and stability alarms for ordering and
printing.
A fuzzy set classification, similar to that for contingency
analysis, has been developed for both transient [5] and dynamic
I instability.
The former classifies generator machine rotor angle, ro-
I

I
I tor acceleration and kinetic energy into four fuzzy sets, i.e.
Find centre of gravity by a binary I Stable, CriticallySt(ableLow, CriticallyStableHigh and Un-
search of this total area to give I
the performance index (PI) for I ’
I
stable. Each of these categories is represented by system
I each contingent quantity I operator-defined “limits”. For example, in the case of machine
I I

I
I
rotor angle, S is classified according to its angle swing from its
I
I
initial pre-contingentposition, e.g. an angle swing of 70 to 100
I
I severity index (SI) for this contingenc degrees may be classified as CriticallyStableHigh.
I
I
This in itself could be used as the sole measurement of
I
I transient stability. H!owever, in some cases with pump-storage
I
machines, the rotor angle can swing, exceeding 110 degrees,
and still return to its original position without pole-slipping.
Fig. 3. Fuzzy-set based contingency analysis algoritbm Because of this, two additional measurements are made on rotor
acceleration and machine kinetic energy. These are classified
according to operator experience in a similar way to that for
The relative severity of each contingent quantity, as it is rotor angles.
calculated by the main PowSim simulation loop, is evaluated Once these classifications have been made, a set of “hard-
1116

wired‘ ’ fuzzy reasoning rules are used to make a decision on the order functions [SI.
group stability. These rules are of the form “If A And B Or C with ra = 2 to illus
Then D” . a Contingency with many sm
For dynamic stability assessment, both oscillatory (power equally with one with a
oscillations between two transmission regions) and aperiodic A time domain sim
(system variables ramping against one another) instability can
be detected.
The former is more common so this will be described. A
single parameter is used, that of machine rotor angle, although
generatedpower could be utilisedjust as effectively. A threshold
value is set, below which the system is deemed to be stable.
C. E E E 57 Bus System
The amplitude of the rotor angle oscillation with respect to the
thresholdlevel is again categorised in one of threeclassifications A network was
and a set of rules of the type “If A And B Then C” are used to system which was
yield a decision on the system stability. This was modified

N.RESULTS
The database was built
A single processor or serial version of the real-time sim- busbar, 57 load and 7 g
ulator PowSim running on a sole 66MHz 486 PC was used. Table 1 shows the
Simulations were carried out for both the E E E 57 bus test
network [6] and a reduced British National Grid system for = 20”) is used as the be
fuzzy and traditional approaches to security assessment.

A. Procedure

Time simulations using a time step of 40 ms were run for

each contingency in a pre-determined database consisting of
single or multiple transmission line outages (both sending and
receiving end primary tripping), 3-phase to ground faults OR
by one place.
busbars, busbar load losses and generator trips for a screening
period of one second. Those cases that produce limit violations
were added to a memory stack list for a subsequent evalaation TABLE 1. RES
period of ten seconds. If transient in occurred during the
one second time interval, these cont s were screened out
and placed at the top of the final ranking order, since these are
naturally the most severe cases. If after the evaluation intend,
undamped or, at least, poorly damped power oscillations were
still present, the time simulation was extended to determine the
system state after a further sixty seconds for dynamic instability.

B. Benchmarking
A numerical method based on the performance index, as
described by [7],
was used as the benchmark for the new fuzzy
contingency analysis approach. The general structure of‘such
an index is. advantage over the b
computation as show
N

%=I D. NGCSystem

where fi ( 2 , )is alinear function of x Z which denotes one of either

(Pz/P,”“”),(AK/AKmaz) or (AQI/AQYaz), the MVA transmis-
sion line flows, changes in load busbar vpltage magnitudes or used. This is simi
generator busbar injections with respect to their corresponding
ratings. wz is a real non-negative weighting coefficient. The PI
is calculated for all the lines and/or busbars in the network and
summed for each variable type to yield the total system severity
index (SI). The exponent value n has been set to 20, since this
will reduce many of the masking errors associated with lower

TABLE 2. RESULTS FOR NGC NETWORK (BASE CASE CONDITION)
11 A la~ o r-i t h m
._ -
1 No.ofMisrankings I No.ofStab*tYCases
Top10 1 Top20 Transient I Dynamic
Numerical 7 I 15 0 1
(n = 2)
(Sigmoid)
TABLE 3. RESULTS EOR NGC NETWORK (STRESSED CONDITION)
Algorithm No. of Misrankings I No. of Stability Cases
Top 10 I Top20 I I
Transient Dynamic
(n = 2)
(n = 20)
Fuzzy-Set
(Sigmoid)
A contingency database containing the perceived most
significant double circuit line outages for this study was used
with a total of 100entries. Again the misrankings are prominent
for the n = 2 numerical algorithm, with less errors for the fuzzy
set approach.
Again, as for the IEEE test study, it can be seen that there
were no cases of either transient or dynamic instabilitydetected
by any of the methods for the base case condition. However,
three transiently unstable and one dynamically unstable contin-
gency were present in the stressed condition.
V. CONCLUSIONS
In this paper a fuzzy set approach has been described
that addresses the area of security assessment. Although this
methodology has been tried in previous research, power system
models of the size tested in this study have not been attempted,
especiallybased on a real-time electromechanicalsimulator.
Algorithms have been presented that permit contingency
analysis and stability detection to be conducted without losing
synchronismwith real-time. Even though a single processorver-
sion of the simulator (PowSim) was used to test these algorithms
(hence the relatively slow evaluation cycle times), subsequent
research has shown encouraging results based on a distributed
parallel processing architecture.
The results that have been presented here have shown a
favourablespeed-up in execution time as compared to the more
traditional numerical techniques. This is due to the relative lack
of calculation, since only rule processing needs to be conducted.
1117
VI.. ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
The authors would like to thank the continual technical and
I T i e i n I) financial support of NGC plc during the course of this research.
minutes
0 57.85 VII. REFERENCES
72.36 Balu, N.J., Bertram, T., Bose, A., Brandwajn, V., Cauley, G., Curtice, D.,
Fouad, A.A., Fink, IL., Lauby, M.G., Wollenberg, B.F., and Wmbel, J.N.,
‘On-Line Power System Security Analysis’, in Proceedings of the IEEE,
42.81
vol. 80, no. 2,1992, pp. 260--280.
Berry, T., Dale, L.A., Daniels, A.R. and Dunn, R.W., “Real-Time Model-
ling of Multi-Machine Power Systems”, in IEE Proc. C, vol. 140, no. 4,
July 1993, pp. 241-;!48.
Zadeh, L.A., “Outlie of a New Approach to the Aklysis of Complex
Systems and Decision Processes”, in IEEE Trans. System, Man and
Cybernetics, vol. 3, no. 1, Jan 1973,pp. 28-44.
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Hm,Y.Y. and Kuo, H.C., “Fuzzy-Set Based Contingency Ranking”, in
IEEE Trans. Power System, vol. 7, no. 3, Aug 1992,pp. 1189-1195.
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Souflis, J.L. and Machias, A.V., “A Fuzzy Approach in the Determination
of Unstable Machines”, in IEE Proc. C, vol. 137, no. 2, March 1990,
pp. 115-122.
Freris, L.L. and Sasson, A.M., “Investigation of the Load Flow Problem”,
70.88 in IEEE Proc., vol. 1115, no. 10, Oct 1968,pp. 1459-1470.
Ejebe, G.C. and Wollenberg, B.F., “Automatic Contingency Selection”,
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1919,pp. 97--104.
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VIU. BIOGRAPHIES
Christian G. Groom was born in Brighton, UK in 1970. He received his BEng
Hons. Degree in Electronic and Electrical Engineering from the University of
Bath, UK in 1989. During that time he also gained experience with NGC plc.
He has recently received his PhD (in 1994) from the Power and Energy Systems
Research Group, School of Electronic and ElectricalEngineering, University of
Bath and is an Associate Member of the Institute of ElectricalEngineers as well
as being a Member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. At
present his research intenests are the applicationsof fuzzy-basedexpertsystems
to power system securityproblems.
Ka Wing Chan was born in Hong Kong, 1965. He received his BSc Hons.
and PhD Degrees in Electronic and Electrical Engineering from the University
of Bath, UK in 1988 and 1992 respectively. He is currently a researcherin the
Power and Energy Systerns Research Group, School of Electronic and Electrical
Engineering, University Df Bath. His general research interests are in the areas
of distributed and parallel processing, aaificial intelligence techniques, power
system stability and security.
Rod W. DUM received his BSc and PhD in Electrical Engineering from the
University of Bath in 1081 and 1984 respectively. He became a lecturer in
computing and control at the University of Bath and is now a member of the
Power and Energy Systmu Group. His research areas include parallel and
real-time computing, power system modelling and control using AI methods.
He has published over 30 technical papers and is involved in the IEE UK.
Richard A. Daniels was born in Plymouth, UK in 1933. He received hls
degrees from the University of Bristol and he is currentlya senior lecturerat the
University of Bath. He hais wide rangingresearch interest based on the real-time
modelling and controlof complex engineeringsystems with particular emphasis
on power systems and road and rail transport systems.