Artificial Intelligence Applications to

Power Quality

Dr. Trapti Jain

Associate Professor
Discipline of Electrical Engineering
Indian Institute of Technology Indore
 Outline

• Artificial Intelligence
• Applications in Power System
• Issues and Challenges
• Power Quality
• Case Study
Artificial Intelligence
 What is Intelligence?
It can be defined as the ability to learn and understand, learn from
experience, apply knowledge and skills to adapt to new situations or
solve problems, make judgements or have opinions that are based on
reason.

Image source: internet

 What is Artificial Intelligence (AI)?
It is simulating intelligence in machines so that they can be made to do
the tasks as done by humans.

Image source: internet

 Examples of AI

Smart Assistants (like He-Google, Spam filters on

Robo-advisors
Siri, Alexa, Cortona) emails

Chatbots for customer service Social media monitoring tools for Song or TV show or video
dangerous content or false news recommendations

Image source: internet

 Relationship between AI, ML and DL

Image source: https://datacatchup.com/artificial-intelligence-machine-learning-and-deep-learning//

Image source: https://datacatchup.com/artificial-intelligence-machine-learning-and-deep-learning//
 Supervised and Unsupervised Learning

Image source: https://crate.io/a/an-introduction-to-machine-learning/

 Classification vs. Clustering vs. Regression
• In classification distinct groups of data exist and new data
elements should be classified into these existing groups.
• In clustering no groups of data exist initially but one creates
groups from the data close to each other.
• In regression methods the idea is to identify a line with a certain
slope that is able to describe the data.

Image Source: http://www.big-data.tips/machine-learning-methods

 Dimensionality reduction

Dimensionality reduction tries to

transfer high-dimensional data
into efficient low-dimensional
representations by finding
appropriate transformation.

Image Source: Internet

 Reinforcement Learning

Image Source: Internet

Model-based and Model-free Reinforcement learning

• Model-based: uses a
previously learned model
to accomplish the task

• Model-free: relies on some

trial and error experience
for action selection

Image Source: Dayan P, Niv Y, Reinforcement learning: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, Curr Opin Neurobiol (2008),
doi:10.1016/j.conb.2008.08.003
Applications in Power Systems
 Necessity of AI in power system

Power System AI
• Complex in structure and • Data-driven method capable to
mathematical model, non- model any degree of non-linearity
linear behavior without requiring apriori
knowledge of system model

• Conventional methods for • Learning ability and fast response

various analysis are time
consuming
 Suitability of AI for power system problems
• Forecasting – load, price, generation
• Economic load dispatch
• Security assessment
• Transient stability assessment
• Fault diagnosis
• Power system control
• Power quality monitoring
• Available Transfer Capability
• Congestion management
 ANN based solution approach
• Generation of data base
• Input feature selection
• Preprocessing of data
• Architecture of ANN
• Training algorithm and parameters
• Performance evaluation
Issues and Challenges
v Scalability
• The ability to scale ANN applications to realistic
dimensions for power system problems

v Selection of Input features

• Realistic power systems have potentially tens of
thousands of inputs at the system level.
• The choice of feature selection technique should be
judicious.

v Size of training set

• Large training set containing all the possible loading
levels and topologies of the system is required to obtain
sufficient accuracy.
v Size of ANN
• The dimension of the architecture space is infinite since
the number of neurons and nodal connections is
unbounded.

v Long training time

• Training time increases non-linearly with problem size.

v Characteristic of training set

• If the training set contains input patterns with different
characteristics, then training of a single ANN could be
difficult.
v Reliability and Accuracy
• ANNs are unable to accommodate relatively minor
deviations in power system operating conditions and
topology.
• ANNs are found to be sensitive to topology changes
leading to inaccurate results.

v Updating the database

• Need to continuously update the training database.
• Any modification in the training set requires retraining of
the ANN.
Power Quality
 Power Quality Definition
• The IEC defines power quality as the characteristics of the
electricity at a given point on an electrical system,
evaluated against a set of reference technical parameters.

• The IEEE defines power quality as a wide variety of

electromagnetic phenomenon that characterize the voltage
and current at a given time and at a particular location on
the power system.

• Any event manifested in voltage, current or frequency,

which results in failure or misoperation of equipments is a
PQ problem.
 Causes of PQ Disturbances
1. Control equipment in the power system
2. Short circuit faults, start and stop of heavy loads
3. Lightning strokes, insulation breakdowns, capacitor
switching
4. Time varying loads (Arc welding, Arc furnace, printer)
5. Static Power Converters (Renewable Energy sources,
Nonlinear loads)
6. Commutation in AC-DC converters
7. Load and Generation Imbalances

Proliferation of renewable energy sources, FACTS devices,

nonlinear loads have increased the Power Quality problems
 Power Quality Disturbances

Stationary Signals

Non-stationary Signals

Image Source: Internet

 Power Quality Disturbances

Voltage rms variations

Voltage Interruption

Voltage Sag Voltage Swell

 Power Quality Disturbances
Voltage fluctuation

Flicker: when voltage variations occur in rapid succession,

with magnitudes large enough to cause lighting level
variations which are noticeable or annoying to human
beings.
 Power Quality Disturbances
Harmonics: integral multiples of
the fundamental frequency
Ex: 100 Hz, 150 Hz, 250 Hz etc.

Interharmonics: non-integral
multiples of the fundamental
frequency
Ex: 82 Hz, 142 Hz, 412 Hz etc.

Sub-harmonics: frequency<50 Hz
Ex: 12 Hz, 35 Hz etc.
 Power Quality Disturbances
Transients
• Impulsive
• Oscillatory

Impulsive Oscillatory
 Power Quality Disturbances
Notch

Noise

Imbalance
 Effects of PQ Disturbances
1. Process or equipment shutdown
2. Failure of electronic devices and controllers
3. Light flicker
4. Overheating of motor and transformer windings
5. Premature operation of protective devices
6. Metering inaccuracies
7. Insulation breakdown and damage of semiconductor devices
8. Subsynchronus oscillations

Power Quality problems cause long-term issues and economic losses

 Why Power Quality Monitoring?
1. To verify voltage regulation at a service entrance.
2. To design and improve the power quality mitigation
devices
3. To make system improvements.
4. To diagnose incompatibilities between the source
and load.
5. To develop equipment compatibility specifications.

It is essential to monitor, analyze and estimate the PQ of the

power system
 Power Quality Monitoring

A/D
Voltage/ Signal Processing and Power Quality
Process
Current Signal Intelligent Techniques Analysis

Processing
1. Estimation of PQ Indices
Non-linear loads or
2. Monitoring of amplitude &
Renewable Energy Sources
frequency
3. Detection of PQ disturbances

To define, measure, quantify and interpret PQ disturbances

occurring
Intelligent Classification Techniques for PQ Disturbances
o Expert Systems
• Not data constrain
• Slow in execution, assumption based
o Fuzzy Logic
• Accurate in modeling and analyzing complex systems
• Not suitable for new classes
o Artificial Neural Networks (ANN)
• High accuracy for real-time applications, mathematical flexibility
• Depends on network architecture, Noise issue
o Nearest Neighbour
• High accuracy for combined disturbances
• Sensitive to Noise
o Support Vector Machines
• Provides stable solution, high learning process, easy implementation
• Poor classification accuracy if dataset is less
Case Study: Classification of PQ Disturbances
 Proposed Approach

• Divide-to-conquer principle-based frequency estimation.

• Signal decomposition using EWT-based adaptive filters.

• Feature extraction from the mono-frequency components.

• Development of a dual FFNN based classifier for the classification of a

single and combined PQ disturbances.
 Empirical Wavelet Transform
• This technique was proposed by J. Gilles in 2013 [8]
with an objective to extract different modes by building
adaptive wavelet filters.

• One low pass and M-1 band pass filters in frequency

domain.
 Empirical Wavelet Transform
Voltage signal, x(n)

Ω1 Ω2 ΩM-1
Compute the FFT, X(k)

Frequencies,
𝜔 = {𝜔! , 𝜔" , 𝜔# , … . . 𝜔$ }

Fourier segmentation
Boundaries Ω% = 0, Ω$ = 𝑓& +1000

Wi as mean or Local minima of two frequencies "i = 1, 2,..M - 1

 Empirical Wavelet Transform
Filter Design

Scaling function
ì 1 if w £ (1 - g )W1 ü
ï ï
ï æp ö ï
f1 (w ) = ícos ç b (g , w , W1 ) ÷ if (1 - g )W1 £ w £ (1 + g )W1 ý
ï è2 ø ï
ï 0 otherwise ï
î þ

Empirical wavelet function

ì 1 if (1 + g )Wi £ w £ (1 - g )Wi +1 ü
ï ï
ïcos æ p b (g , w , W ) ö if (1 - g )W £ w £ (1 + g )W ï
ïï çè 2 i +1 ÷
ø
i +1 i +1 ï
ï
y i (w ) = í ý
ï sin æ p b (g , w , W ) ö if (1 - g )W £ w £ (1 + g )W ï
ï çè 2 i ÷
ø
i i ï
ï ï
ïî 0 otherwise ïþ

Transition Phase 𝜏' = 𝛾𝛺' 39

 Empirical Wavelet Transform
Approximation coefficients

Wx (1, t ) = x,f1 = IFFT ( X (w)f1(w) )

Detail coefficients
Wx (i, t ) = x,y i = IFFT ( X (w)y i (w) )

Extracted mono components

Adaptive Filtering Technique 1
Windowed
signal x(n)

Frequency
Apply FFT
X(ω) estimation

Estimate the fundamental and harmonics

1 set of frequencies Λ1
st

Design the wavelet filters (2) in Fourier domain with these

frequencies as center frequency

Construct the Fourier spectrum X 1(ω) containing the

estimated frequencies Λ1 using (10)

+ - X1(ω)

X2(ω)
Estimate the interharmonics
2nd set of frequencies Λ2
Process the nearest frequencies

Final set of frequencies Λ

2 Filter design
Identify the local minima that defines the boundaries Ω1,2,….N-1

Build a bank of N empirical wavelet filters (1) & (2) in the

frequency domain

Obtain the mono components by applying inverse FFT to the

product of the Fourier spectrum and filters using (3) & (4)
Wx(1,n) Wx(2,n) Wx(N,n)
3
Feature extraction
F1 FM
4
Dual Feed Forward Neural Network
 Feature Extraction
• The features extracted should be informative, unique, easy
to extract and robust to noise.

• The computation of features from the half cycle, which has

disturbance is much preferable than extracting features
from the whole signal.

• Thus, the primary step is the identification of a half cycle of

the input signal where the waveform deviation initiates.
 Feature Extraction
First, compute the RMS for each fundamental half cycle of the
input signal as defined below
1 1 nS
X rms (n) = å x(i)2
2 S i =( n -1) S +1

Where, Xrms(n) is nth half cycle RMS of the discrete signal x(i)
and S is the number of samples in a half cycle. The windowed
signal of 200 ms duration having 50 Hz as the fundamental
frequency will give a signal RMS vector Xrms having values
calculated for 20 half cycles as
X rms = [ X rms (1),..., X rms (n),..., X rms (20)]

The deviation of two consecutive half cycles exceeding a

predefined value of 0.01 indicates the presence of disturbances.
X rms (n) - X rms (n -1) ³ 0.01 "n = 2,..20
 Feature Extraction
F1: The horizontal histogram gives
information of the number of
times the values appear in a range
of 0.4. Thereby, the magnitude
from 0 to 2 pu in a range of 0.4 will
give five values of the horizontal
histogram as shown in fig. (c).

F2: The vertical histogram shown

in fig. (d), is the sum of the signal
magnitudes in a range of 2 ms.
Hence, five values of vertical
histograms are calculated for a half
cycle of 10 ms duration.
 Feature Extraction
F3: The RMS value of the disturbance half cycle of the input signal is considered as the
third feature.
F 3 = X rms (h)

F4: This feature represents the amount of deviation of the disturbance half cycle (h)
with its consecutive half cycle, computed as
F 4 = X rms (h) - X rms (h +1)

F5: The RMS value of the fundamental frequency component extracted from the
adaptive filtering technique plays a key role in the discrimination of flicker, notch, and
spike from the fundamental magnitude related disturbances. Thus, the feature F5 is the
RMS value of the fundamental component calculated for only h half cycle.
1 hS
1
F 5 = X1rms (h) = å x1 (i)2
2 S i =(h-1) S +1
 Feature Extraction
F6: The high-frequency harmonic distortion HHD(h) separates all the harmonics
related signals from other class of signals
X Hrms (h)
HHD(h) =
X1rms (h)

Where, X1rms(h) represents the h half cycle RMS value of the fundamental frequency
component. XHrms(h) is the h half cycle RMS value of the high-frequency harmonic
signal xH, which contains only the components with frequency ≥ 300 Hz.
1 1 hS
X Hrms (h) = å xH (i)2
2 S i =(h-1) S +1

F7: This novel feature, mean of the detected half cycle h and its consecutive half
cycle of the input signal, x(i) helps in detection of transient, notch, and spike.
1 i =( h +1) S
F7 = å x(i)
2S i =( h -1) S +1
 Feature Extraction
F8: The discrimination of voltage interruption, sag and swell from each other is
possible only with features reflecting the magnitude of the fundamental frequency
component. Hence, the per cycle RMS value for ten cycles of the fundamental
frequency component is calculated as
F8 = [ X rms (1),..., X rms (n),..., X rms (10)]

F9: The last feature, mean of the twenty half cycle HHD values reflect the presence
of high-frequency harmonic distortion over the complete input signal.
F9 = mean(HHD)
 Data Flow
Signal

Xrms Vector
Adaptive
Filtering
Find the half cycle “h” Technique

Vertical and
Horizontal
histograms of Xrms(h) Xrms(h+1) F7
half cycle
per cycle per cycle
X1rms Vector HHD Vector
+ -

X1rms(h)
Mean(HHD)
HHD(h)

FFNN 1 FFNN 2

Oscillatory Harmonics/
Flicker Notch Spike Interruption Sag Swell
Transient Interharmonics
 1 1 1

Dual FFNN F1
2
3
4
2
.
2
. 1 Flicker
. .
5
. Oscillatory
6 . 2
Transient
7 . .
F2 8 . . 3 Notch
9
. .
10
F3 11 . . 4 Spike
F4 12
. .
F5 13
29 29
F6 14
F7 15 30 30

1 1
1
2 2
2
. . 1 Interruption
3
. .
4
. . 2 Sag
5
F8 . .
6
. . 3 Swell
7
. .
8
. . 4 Harmonics
9 . .
10 29 29

F9 11 30 30
 Results
• Eight single and ten two-combination disturbances are considered for
analysis along with a pure sinusoidal signal.
• A complete set of 7,600 patterns with 400 patterns of each class are
generated by varying the parameters and duration of an event.
• The synthetic signals are contaminated with the additive white
Gaussian noise of SNR varying from 25 dB to 55 dB
• Different phase angles are also considered with a fundamental
frequency variation of ± 0.5 Hz
• The 50 Hz fundamental frequency signals of 200 ms are generated at
a sampling rate of 10 kHz, yielding 2000 samples per window
• The dual FFNN classifier is initially trained with 300 patterns of each
disturbance and the remaining for evaluating the dual FFNN.
 Classification Accuracy
• For noiseless case, minimum accuracy for sag
with transient and swell with transient.

• For noisy case, few voltage interruption signals

are treated as sag signals.

• Some flicker signals misclassified as normal

sinusoidal signal.

• Sag with harmonics and swell with harmonics are

considered as single disturbance.

• Only spike is less accurately identified.

Performance Comparison
 Real Disturbances
(a)Current drawn by CFL lamps
acquired at a sampling rate
of 6.4 kHz

(a)Harmonic voltage signal

obtained from distribution
system of an academic
institution at a sampling rate
of 6.4 kHz

(a)60 Hz voltage sag signal

sampled at 15.36 kHz,
provided by IEEE 1159.2
Results of Real Signals
• For current harmonic, F4 and F7
are very low and F6 is high

• For voltage harmonic, same

observations

• For voltage sag, F3, F5 and F8

are the indicators

• For transient signal, F4, F6, F7

and F9 are the indicators
 Conclusion
• The advantage of the computational efficiency of the FFT and
adaptiveness of the filter design makes the adaptive filtering technique
suitable for decomposing the distortion signal quickly and accurately.

• The use of ANN having one output neuron dedicated for a single
disturbance helps in recognising the combined disturbances and also
improves the robustness to noise.

• The experimentations carried out with the simulated as well as a few

real power signals clearly reveal the speed, accuracy and practical
applicability of the proposed approach.
Thank You