Abstract

A failure in a power transmission line causes a number of circuit breakers to activate in an eort to isolate the failure and prevent it from corrupting the rest of the power system. Based on information from these physically distributed protective devices, a central controller needs to quickly identify and locate the failure. The task becomes challenging due to the complexity of modern power transmission networks and due to the possibility of multiple sensor failures or incorrect operation of protective devices. In this paper we investigate a solution to this problem using Petri net models. Our approach is attractive because it allows concurrent/incremental processing of the information that arrives at the controller and because it requires only simple calculations (linear checks) during execution time. Most reasoning is implicitly performed at design time, which gives our method an important edge for real-time monitoring. Furthermore, these same techniques can potentially handle mult...

Citations