Location Identification of Power Line Outages Using PMU Measurements with Bad Data

Abstract: The use of phasor angle measurements provided by phasor measurement units (PMUs) in fault detection is regarded as a promising method in identifying locations of power line outages. However, communication errors or system malfunctions may introduce errors to the measurements and thus yield bad data. Most of the existing methods on line outage identification fail to consider such error. This paper develops a framework for identifying multiple power line outages based on the PMUs' measurements in the presence of bad data. In particular, we design an algorithm to identify locations of line outage and recover the faulty measurements simultaneously. The proposed algorithm does not require any prior information on the number of line outages and the noise variance. Case studies carried out on test systems of different sizes validate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed approach.