Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS)

With the unprecedented growth of renewable resources, electric vehicles, and controllable loads, power system has been incorporating increasing amount of unconventional generations and loads. As a consequence, significant dynamic and stochastic power flow are introduced into distribution network, requiring high resolution monitoring technology and agile decision support techniques for system diagnosis and control. In this paper, we discuss the application of micro-synchrophasor measurement unit (µPMU) for power distribution network monitoring, and we propose a novel data-driven method, namely Ensembles of Bundle Classifier (EBC), for event detection. The main idea is: multiple classifiers are learned each with a short slot of µPMU measurement generated by a single event. Then their decisions are combined with a “winner-takes-all” scheme. This framework naturally resolves the challenging issue of heterogeneity in the high resolution µPMU data, and significantly outperforms classic data-driven event detection methods. In this paper, the proposed framework is tested on an actual distribution network with µPMUs, and is compared to other state-of-the-art methods. The result justifies the effectiveness of EBC as a promising tool to improve the security and reliability of distribution network.