Distributed Power-Line Outage Detection Based on Wide Area Measurement System

In modern power grids, the fast and reliable detection of power-line outages is an important functionality, which prevents cascading failures and facilitates an accurate state estimation to monitor the real-time conditions of the grids. However, most of the existing approaches for outage detection suffer from two drawbacks, namely: (i) high computational complexity; and (ii) relying on a centralized means of implementation. The high computational complexity limits the practical usage of outage detection only for the case of single-line or double-line outages. Meanwhile, the centralized means of implementation raises security and privacy issues. Considering these drawbacks, the present paper proposes a distributed framework, which carries out in-network information processing and only shares estimates on boundaries with the neighboring control areas. This novel framework relies on a convex-relaxed formulation of the line outage detection problem and leverages the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) for its distributed solution. The proposed framework invokes a low computational complexity, requiring only linear and simple matrix-vector operations. We also extend this framework to incorporate the sparse property of the measurement matrix and employ the LSQRalgorithm to enable a warm start, which further accelerates the algorithm. Analysis and simulation tests validate the correctness and effectiveness of the proposed approaches.