Probabilistic Joint State Estimation for Operational Planning

Due to a high penetration of renewable energy, power systems operational planning today needs to capture unprecedented uncertainties in a short period. Fast probabilistic state estimation (SE), which creates probabilistic load flow estimates, represents one such planning tool. This paper describes a graphical model for probabilistic SE modeling that captures both the uncertainties and the power grid via embedding physical laws, i.e., KCL and KVL. With such a modeling, the resulting maximum a posteriori (MAP) SE problem is formulated by measuring state variables and their interactions. To resolve the computational difficulty in calculating the marginal distribution for interested quantities, a distributed message passing method is proposed to compute MAP estimates using increasingly available cyber resources, i.e., computational and communication intelligence. A modified message passing algorithm is then introduced to improve the convergence and optimality. Simulation results illustrate the probabilistic SE and demonstrate the improved performance over traditional deterministic approaches via (1) the more accuracy mean estimate, (2) the confidence interval covering the true state, and (3) the reduced computational time.