Synchrophasor network-based detection and classification of power system events: A singular value decomposition approach

Timely detection and classification of power system events are essential for situation awareness and reliable electricity grid operation. It is also a crucial step with regard to synchrophasor network data management and archiving. In this paper, an event detection and classification method based on the singular value decomposition (SVD) of synchrophasor data is proposed. The detection algorithm exploits the low-dimensionality characteristics of synchrophasor data and identifies the changes in the dimensionality of a sliding data matrix. The SVD-based method assigns several detection flags indicating events and outliers in voltage magnitude, phase angle and frequency data. The proposed classification algorithm comprises a decision tree employing detection flags and singular values to classify events into several categories, e.g., fault, voltage magnitude and phase angle events, and generation-load mismatch events. Moreover, the proposed algorithm identifies whether events are spatially correlated. Field synchrophasor data collected from a smart grid are used to evaluate the performance of the proposed method. The numerical results show that the proposed method can successfully detect and classify different types of events even in the presence of measurement uncertainty. •Experimental singular value thresholding reduces accuracy of low-rank estimation.•Phasor measurement accuracy information used to enhance singular value thresholding.•No training data is needed for proposed event classification.•Singular values and detection flags are used for classification.•Low-computational requirements enables online event detection and classification.