Artificial Neural-Net Based Dynamic Security Assessment for Electric Power Systems

In the post-fault dynamic analysis of interconnected power systems, the critical fault clearing time (CCT) is one of the parameters of paramount importance. Critical clearing time is a complex function of pre-fault system conditions (operating point, topology, system parameters), fault structure (type and location) and post-fault conditions that are in part dependent on the protective relaying policy. To define analytically such a relationship would be highly desirable but diversity of variable involved makes this task extremely complicated. Our efforts focus on examination of that complex mapping and investigation of the influence of the various parameters on CCT. The evaluation of CCT involves elaborate computations that often include time-consuming solutions of nonlinear on-fault system equations. Existing conventional pattern recognition techniques are incapable of synthesizing such complex and transparent mappings. Thus, when a human operator tells the machine learning unit (that is the pattern recognizer) that system state belongs to a certain class, say "emergency", the pattern recognizer merely records that classification mindlessly and is not able to look at the pattern with insight and discover what underlies the "emergency" nature of pattern. It is, therefore, highly desirable to have a mechanism which when presented with a sequence of class labeled patterns not only learns an internal structure which allows it to generalize and to classify other and to classify other patterns correctly, but also is able to shed some light on what combination of features give rise to the particular class membership.