1 New Applications for Wide-Area Monitoring, Protection and Control Sven C. M¨ uller, Student Member, IEEE, Andreas Kubis, Student Member, IEEE, Sebastian Brato, Student Member, IEEE, Ulf H¨ ager, Christian Rehtanz, Senior Member, IEEE, and J¨ urgen G¨ otze, Member, IEEE Abstract—As operation of electrical transmission systems faces new challenges due to liberalization and integration of renewable energies, novel solutions for power system management are needed. At the same time, the development of smart grids also pushes high performance communication and information technology that contribute decisively in enabling a dynamic monitoring, protection and control of large-scale and wide- spread power systems. The potential offered by smart grids and new fast controllable power systems equipment needs to be exploited by development of valuable applications for power system operation. Moreover, first experiences with selected ded- icated applications call for the design of an integrated wide- area monitoring, protection and control (WAMPAC) system. This paper presents recent progress of research unit FOR1511 in the development of WAMPAC applications for stability monitoring, protection schemes based on wide-area information, and real-time congestion management. The research unit aims at developing a coherent WAMPAC system taking into account interdependencies and synergies of newly developed applications and conventional local systems in place. Index Terms—defense plan, power system operation, real-time congestion management, smart grids, stability assessment, system identificaton, WAMPAC. I. I NTRODUCTION I NTEGRATION of renewable energy sources and the lib- eralization of electricity markets pose new challenges for the secure operation of the European power system. As grid expansion projects face obstacles in realization while network utilization increases and becomes more and more volatile, the electrical transmission system needs to be operated close to its operational limits and with increasing dynamic. An advanced dynamic system management will technically be enabled by new developments in power system equipment such as Flexible AC Transmission Systems (FACTS), High-Voltage Direct Current (HVDC) technology and synchronized Phasor Measurement Units (PMUs), as well as modern information and communication technology (ICT) that becomes wide- spread with the rise of smart grids. Research and engineering now need to develop efficient applications to make use of the new technical possibilities in order to meet current and future operational challenges. For this purpose, it is critical to design This work was supported by the German Research Foundation DFG as part of research unit FOR1511 (http://www.for1511.tu-dortmund.de). S. C. M¨ uller, A. Kubis, U. H¨ ager and C. Rehtanz are with the Institute of Energy Systems, Energy Efficiency and Energy Economics, TU Dortmund University, Dortmund, Germany (e-mail: see http://www.ie3.tu-dortmund.de). S. Brato and J. G¨ otze are with the Information Processing Lab, TU Dortmund University, Dortmund, Germany (e-mail: see http://www.dt.e- technik.uni-dortmund.de). a coherent overall approach for system operation taking into account the strong interdependencies of various protection and control schemes. A key concept of modern power system operation is the im- plementation of Wide-Area Monitoring, Protection and Con- trol (WAMPAC) systems. Based on first practical experiences with dedicated wide-area monitoring, protection and control applications, it has been stressed that realization of the vision of an integrated WAMPAC system is highly desirable as it would provide significant benefits in sharing of data, network resources and ease of system expansion [1]. At TU Dortmund, DFG research unit FOR1511 ”Protection and Control Systems for Reliable and Secure Operation of Electrical Transmission Systems” combines expertise from power and communication engineering, statistics and computer science in order to design coherent WAMPAC applications based on the latest progress of the disciplines involved. Furthermore, a comprehensive simulation environment is created for validation and testing of real-time capabilities of the newly developed algorithms in power system scenarios close to reality. This paper is structured as follows: First, section II ad- dresses state of the art applications and related work. In section III, recent developments and simulation results for three selected applications in FOR1511 are presented. These include stability assessment based on system identification and clustering (III-A), an agent-based control system for real-time congestion management (III-B) and a wide-area protection scheme for transmission corridors (III-C). Last, the paper is closed with a conclusion and outlook on future work. II. STATE OF THE ART AND RELATED WORK In this section, WAMPAC applications already state of the art or subject of current research are presented. As until today typically dedicated applications targeting either monitoring, protection or control are developed, the section is divided in these fields. Fig. 1 summarizes essential wide-area applications emphasizing the partial overlapping of the three domains that should be addressed in an integrated WAMPAC system. A. Wide-Area Monitoring A key enabler for modern wide-area monitoring systems (WAMS) is the introduction of multiple PMUs placed at sev- eral locations in the network as a complement to conventional measurements. The PMUs enable the availability of time- synchronized snapshots of the network including voltage and 2012 3rd IEEE PES Innovative Smart Grid Technologies Europe (ISGT Europe), Berlin 978-1-4673-2597-4/12/$31.00 ©2012 IEEE