Copyright © 2010 A. R. Messina et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

Characterization of spatial and temporal changes in the dynamic patterns of a nonstationary process is a problem of great theoretical and practical importance. On-line monitoring of large-scale power systems by means of time-synchronized Phasor Measurement Units (PMUs) provides the opportunity to analyze and characterize inter-system oscillations. Wide-area measurement sets, however, are often relatively large, and may contain phenomena with differing temporal scales. Extracting from these measurements the relevant dynamics is a difficult problem. As the number of observations of real events continues to increase, statistical techniques are needed to help identify relevant temporal dynamics from noise or random effects in measured data. In this paper, a statistically based, data-driven framework that integrates the use of wavelet-based EOF analysis and a sliding window-based method is proposed to identify and extract, in near-real-time, dynamically independent spatiotemporal patterns from time synchronized data. The method deals with the information in space and time simultaneously, and allows direct tracking and characterization of the nonstationary time-frequency dynamics of oscillatory processes. The efficiency and accuracy of the developed procedures for extracting localized information of power system behavior from time-synchronized phasor measurements of a real event in Mexico is assessed.