IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON POWER SYSTEMS, VOL. 25, NO.
2, MAY 2010
Design of a Real-Time Security Assessment
Tool for Situational Awareness Enhancement
in Modern Power Systems
Ruisheng Diao, Student Member, IEEE, Vijay Vittal, Fellow, IEEE, and Naim Logic, Senior Member, IEEE
Abstract—Detailed security analysis for contingencies
( = 1 2 3 . . .) in a real-time setting is still a great challenge
due to the significant computational burden. This paper takes ad-
vantage of phasor measurement units (PMUs) and decision trees
(DTs) to develop a real-time security assessment tool to assess four
important post-contingency security issues, including voltage mag-
nitude violation (VMV), thermal limit violation (TV), voltage sta-
bility (VS) and transient stability (TS). The proposed scheme is
tested on the Salt River Project (SRP) power system represented by
a series of operating conditions (OCs) during a representative day.
The properly trained DTs demonstrate excellent prediction perfor-
mance. Robustness tests for the offline trained DTs are performed
on a group of changed OCs that were not included for training the
DTs and the idea of tuning critical system attributes for preventive
controls is also presented to improve system security.
Index Terms—Classification tree, decision tree, online security
assessment, preventive control, regression tree, thermal violation,
transient stability, voltage magnitude violation, voltage stability.
I. INTRODUCTION
S modern power systems are being operated at a more
A stressed level because of deregulation and the difficulty
of adding new transmission capacity, occurrence of critical con-
tingencies may violate secure operation limits and even initiate
severe stability problems. A severe contingency can result in ad-
verse impacts on the system in terms of various security issues,
determined by the disturbance type and severity. So far, the most
accurate and practical measure to assess different security issues
is via commercial simulation packages by properly modeling
system components. However, such a detailed analysis method
in a near real-time manner is still a great challenge due to the
high nonlinearity and high dimensionality of large scale power
systems. The data dimensionality problem in fact makes it im-
possible to scan all combinations of
contingencies in a reasonable time frame. Traditionally system
dynamic security analysis is carried out on a few preselected
contingencies in the time interval of several minutes (e.g., most
of and some of the important contingencies).
Manuscript received July 10, 2009; revised August 31, 2009. First published
December 01, 2009; current version published April 21, 2010. This work was
supported in part by Salt River Project and in part by the Power System Engi-
neering Research Center. Paper no. TPWRS-00530-2009.
R. Diao and V. Vittal are with the Department of Electrical Engineering, Ari-
zona State University, Tempe, AZ 85287 USA (e-mail: ruisheng.diao@asu.edu;
vijay.vittal@asu.edu).
N. Logic is with the Salt River Project, Phoenix, AZ 85287-5706 USA
(e-mail: Naim.Logic@srpnet.com).
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TPWRS.2009.2035507
0885-8950/$26.00 © 2009 IEEE
Authorized licensed use limited to: INDIAN INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY MADRAS. Downloaded on March 27,2023 at 05:00:42 UTC from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply.
957
In many instances the hazardous impacts of contingen-
cies can be easily ignored until their occurrence, because their
probabilities of occurrence are quite low. Without timely sit-
uational awareness, system operators may not have sufficient
time to arm preventive or corrective controls in order to ensure
system security in case of a dangerous initiating event. More-
over, such a disturbance can further result in cascading outages
and cause a long-term power interruption to customers in a large
area, such as the blackout that occurred on August 14, 2003 in
North America [1]. Therefore, the development of a tool to ac-
curately assess security issues and provide sufficiently fast pre-
diction results in case of critical contingencies is an important
requirement for real-time operation of modern power systems.
The advent of machine learning tools including neural net-
work (NN), decision trees, support vector machines (SVMs)
and self organizing maps (SOMs) provides a promising solu-
tion to achieve this goal [2]. Such technologies take advantage
of exhaustive offline studies to uncover the inherent system at-
tributes related to an objective and provide accurate and fast pre-
diction models for online application using real-time measure-
ments. Compared to other machine learning tools decision trees
have a unique feature that utilizes the thresholds of attributes
(linear classifiers) to predict the considered objective. The ob-
tained thresholds not only help to build a predictive model, but
also generate online nomograms for system operators to arm
control actions.
The use of decision trees in the field of power systems dates
back to the late 1980s [3]. Various applications of decision
trees (DTs) have been reported thereafter, depending on the
design of methodologies to describe the problems to be solved.
In [4], decision trees were trained offline to find the critical
clearing time to assess transient stability. A real-time transient
stability prediction method was proposed in [5] by collecting
post-contingency rotor angles as predictors, which was tested
on the New England 39-bus test system at various operating
conditions. Other efforts involving DTs were also reported in
voltage security monitoring and estimation, loss of synchro-
nism detection and the timing of controlled separation strategy
[6]–[10]. In [11], an online transient security assessment
scheme using DTs and PMUs was presented to predict whether
an contingency can violate transient security criteria
by collecting PMU measured pre-scenario system attributes as
security predictors. In [12], another approach was proposed
to evaluate voltage security problems caused by con-
tingencies at stressed OCs. The PMU measured voltage phase
angle difference, current flow, active power flow, reactive power
flow, square of voltage magnitude and the monitored current
 958 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON POWER SYSTEMS, VOL. 25, NO. 2, MAY 2010

magnitude multiplied by branch impedance are used as voltage

security indicators. The properly trained DTs have shown good
prediction performance (prediction accuracy on the test set
around 95%).
However, several important factors that might influence the
performance of offline trained DTs were not considered in [11]
and [12], including:
1) At normal operating conditions, contingencies
usually do not initiate system instability in operational
models of power systems and therefore the obtained
databases may contain too few insecure cases to train
DTs. The impacts of contingencies should be in-
cluded when training DTs.
2) The OCs generated in [11] and [12] represented typ-
ical operating snapshots during various periods of time,
but the real-time historical dispatch information in the
system was not considered when training offline trees.
This choice might affect DT robustness.
3) The simulations performed in [11] and [12] did not con-
sider detailed load models in the system, which may sig-
nificantly affect simulation results.
In order to further improve DT accuracy and robustness, this
paper takes advantage of previous algorithms developed in [12]
to develop an improved scheme for real-time security assess-
ment. More practical and innovative considerations are included
from different perspectives, by collecting more predictors and
building efficient databases. Actual monitored data obtained for
a whole day is used to generate the databases to train the DTs.
Another novel development is the use of regression trees (RTs),
which is another type of DT compared to classification trees Fig. 1. Flowchart of the improved methodology.
(CTs), for the assessment of VMV and TV problems caused by
contingencies which are very common issues encoun-
tered by operators. Instead of merely providing a secure or in- fast prediction results regarding the potential severity of certain
sure classification result, regression trees are trained to predict contingencies. The thresholds in the DTs also provide nomo-
the severity of a contingency. Two performance indices are de- grams that define operating regions with different risk levels.
fined in this paper to quantify the impacts of VMV and TV prob- Preventive controls can be performed to enhance system secu-
lems, as prediction objectives. Regression trees provide an indi- rity before the occurrence of critical contingencies if the current
cation of the number of overloaded lines and buses with voltage OC enters a high-risk region. If for some reason preventive con-
magnitude violations following a contingency. A higher index trols are not available, corrective controls have to be taken to
value indicates a larger number of problematic elements and a ensure security once a critical contingency occurs.
more severe impact on the system. Therefore this method pro- More details regarding the three-step scheme and the ad-
vides more useful information than a classification result. In the vantages in performing online system security assessment
development of such a scheme, the idea of applying DTs to the are provided in [12, Section III] and not repeated here. This
design of preventive control is also developed. work mainly focuses on addressing the concerns identified
This proposed scheme depicted in Fig. 1, includes three steps: and further enhancing DT performance for online application.
1) offline DT training (24-h look-ahead), 2) periodic DT update The improved scheme is then tested on the SRP system model
(hourly) and 3) online application. represented by a series of real-time OCs during a given day.
The main idea is to first perform exhaustive offline simula- The results exhibit that the improved methodology can obtain
tions to assess the four security issues for the forecasted OCs (a DTs with very high prediction accuracy and demonstrate good
day ahead) using a list of pre-selected and contin- robustness. The rest of this paper is organized as follows.
gencies. A separate DT with good prediction ability is trained In Section II, the basic principles of decision trees including
specifically for the assessment of each type of security issue. CTs and RTs are briefly introduced. Details regarding OC
Two classification trees are trained for stability issues while two generation, system modeling for the SRP system, contingency
regression trees are trained for voltage magnitude and overload selection and database (DB) building for DT training are
violation issues. These DTs are periodically updated every hour discussed. Two performance indices to quantify the impacts
(or when necessary) in order to continuously perform well on of the post-contingency VMV and TV issues are also defined.
the changed OCs that are unforeseen in the offline DT training. Section III provides the performance of the four decision tree
For online application, PMU measurements of critical attributes models including two regression trees and two classification
selected by DTs are made and fed into the DT models to obtain trees. The robustness of the DTs is then tested on unforeseen

Authorized licensed use limited to: INDIAN INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY MADRAS. Downloaded on March 27,2023 at 05:00:42 UTC from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply.
 DIAO et al.: DESIGN OF A REAL-TIME SECURITY ASSESSMENT TOOL
OCs in Section IV and a method to enhance DT performance
is tested. Section V presents a DT assisted approach to design
preventive controls in order to improve system security. Fi-
nally, conclusions and ideas for future work are provided in
Section VI.
II. METHODOLOGY DESCRIPTION
A. Classification Trees and Regression Trees
A decision tree (a type of supervised machine learning tool)
[13], [14] is a tree-structured predictive model for a given “ob-
jective” characterized by a vector of attributes (or predictors).
Based on the nature of the objective (either categorical or nu-
merical), DTs can be categorized as classification trees and re-
gression trees respectively. In this effort, all the CTs and RTs
are trained and tested using a commercial package, called clas-
sification and regression trees (CART) [15], [16].
In CART, a decision tree has a binary structure with two types
of nodes, the internal node with two child nodes and terminal
node without any child node. Each terminal node provides a
prediction result of the form secure (S), insecure (I) or a per-
formance index value. For the purpose of training a good DT, a
learning set and a test set in the same format are required. The
learning set is first used to train a maximal tree by recursively
splitting a parent node into two purer child nodes until further
splitting can no longer improve accuracy and this maximal tree
is then pruned step by step to generate a series of smaller DTs in
order to attenuate the over-fitting problem. The main goal is to
partition all the cases in a high dimensional space into various
sub-regions with homogeneous cases in each region. Details re-
garding splitting and stopping rules and DT pruning algorithms
are provided in [14]. The performances of these smaller DTs on
the test set are scored in terms of the misclassification cost for
CTs and mean-square error for RTs. The optimal tree is there-
fore defined as the tree model with the lowest prediction error
on the test set.
When applied to power system security assessment, classifi-
cation trees are quite suitable for evaluating stability problems
because the prediction objective is secure or insecure following
a contingency. On the other hand, regression trees can effec-
tively quantify the severity of the VMV and TV problems by
defining performance indices as prediction objectives.
B. Analysis Tools
In this paper, three major tools are used to develop the pro-
posed scheme:
1) : Dynamic security analysis tool, developed
by Powertech Lab, Canada [17]. This package is used to
generate system OCs and run different types of security
simulations. It provides a user-friendly interface and in-
cludes the following sub-packages:
• PSAT: Powerflow and short-circuit analysis tool,
which is used to run power flow analysis and create
time-series OCs.
• VSAT: Voltage security assessment tool, which is
used to evaluate voltage stability, thermal violation
and voltage magnitude violation issues following
contingencies.
Authorized licensed use limited to: INDIAN INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY MADRAS. Downloaded on March 27,2023 at 05:00:42 UTC from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply.
959
• TSAT: Transient security assessment tool. It is used
for detailed time-domain simulation to assess tran-
sient stability.
2) CART: Classification and Regression Trees, developed
by Salford Systems, CA [15].
3) MATLAB is used for data collection, database creation
and program interface design.
C. System Studied—the SRP Power System
The SRP system model provided is a part of the Western
Electricity Coordinating Council (WECC) system that contains
approximately 17 252 buses, 3115 generators and 14 989 trans-
mission lines for security analysis. SRP serves a large number
of customers in central Arizona in the U.S. The voltage level
in this model ranges from 11 kV to 500 kV. More than 620
buses, 720 transmission lines, 120 transformers and 110 gen-
erators are monitored by SRP. Currently, there are 33 PMUs
installed on 230-kV and 500-kV buses in the SRP system. The
real-time measurements of these PMUs are used as important
security predictors to train DT models.
D. OC Generation
1) Basic OCs: The main goal of this sub-section is to create
a series of OCs that can accurately represent different system
snapshots during a representative day, July 21, 2008. The data
provided by the SRP staff include the load change pattern, gen-
erator dispatch and capacitor status during this day, with all
major transmission lines in service. Based on this information,
MATLAB codes are developed to interface with PSAT to change
system states to their desired values at different time instants.
Thus, 96 OCs are generated for the whole day, from 0:00 am,
0:15 am, 0:30 am,…, to 23:45 pm. Each of the created OCs is
tuned to comply with the following criteria:
• Voltage magnitudes of all the SRP buses are within the
range 0.95 p.u.–1.1 p.u.
• There are no overloaded transmission lines in the SRP area.
• There are no overloaded transformers in the SRP area.
2) More OCs for Information Enrichment: From the obser-
vations in [12], the data distribution in a high dimensional space
plays an important role in affecting DT performance. Since the
DT is a supervised data mining technique, the more useful in-
formation it learns, the better it performs. Therefore, more oper-
ating conditions are generated around the 96 basic OCs in order
to enrich system information and enhance DT performance. Be-
tween any two adjacent OCs, four additional data points are de-
termined by assuming a linear pattern of load change. This idea
is explained using the equations below and it is shown in Fig. 2:
(1)
(2)
where and represent the active and reactive power de-
mand of a load, respectively. is the bus number where a load
is connected; is the number of OCs and refers to the number
of inserted data points. The active power outputs of the gen-
erators in the SRP area are also changed in a similar manner.
 960
Fig. 2. Idea of inserting more OCs by assuming linearization.
Fig. 3. Active power demand at the created 476 OCs in SRP.
Each of the inserted OCs is tuned to comply with the secure
operating criteria defined previously. The status of transmission
lines and transformers are not changed, based on the assumption
that system maintenance is scheduled a day ahead. The topology
change in the system only results from the occurrence of contin-
gencies. Following this step, 380 additional OCs are generated
around the 96 basic OCs.
Therefore, a total of OCs are generated to rep-
resent the system conditions during this whole day. That means
one power flow file is created for every 3 min. Fig. 3 depicts
the total active load level in the SRP system for the created 476
OCs.
E. Contingency Selection
In this section, two lists of contingencies are considered for
different types of security analysis:
1) First, a list of contingencies on the branches above
200-kV level in the SRP area is created to assess the
VMV and TV issues. This contingency list con-
tains 87 contingencies to be scanned.
2) A second list of contingencies is created to assess
VS and TS issues. This list is provided by the SRP staff,
which includes 181 multi-line outages, generator out-
ages, transformer outages and even shunt element out-
ages.
This is due to the fact that an contingency usually
cannot cause severe stability problems in a realistic power
system at normal OCs that satisfy NERC criteria. However, the
Authorized licensed use limited to: INDIAN INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY MADRAS. Downloaded on March 27,2023 at 05:00:42 UTC from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply.
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON POWER SYSTEMS, VOL. 25, NO. 2, MAY 2010
Fig. 4. Load components in the SRP system.
loss of a heavily loaded transmission line or transformer may
cause voltage magnitude violation and/or thermal violation
problems, both of which are common but very important issues
that operators face in real-time operation. Each contingency in
the above two lists is assigned a unique identification number
that is used as an important security predictor for DT training.
F. Load Modeling
Load modeling is a very complicated topic and requires spe-
cial attention to perform security simulations because it plays
an important role in affecting the simulation results. Normally,
using constant impedance model provides an optimistic result
whereas the constant power model gives a more pessimistic re-
sult [18]. In the SRP system, about 70% of the loads are motors
in residential, industrial and commercial areas according to the
SRP operating staff. For the purpose of obtaining a more real-
istic system behavior, the load components in SRP are assumed
to use the combination in Fig. 4 and the exact percentage of each
portion requires further investigation:
• 30% of the loads are modeled as constant and .
• 70% of the loads are considered as induction motors
(voltage dependent models).
The mathematical models used for different load components
are shown below:
• 30% of the loads are assumed to be air conditioners [19]:
and (3)
• 20% of the loads are large industrial motors [20]:
and (4)
• 20% of the loads in SRP are small industrial motors [20]:
and (5)
• The remaining 30% of the loads are constant and :
(6)
G. Database Building for DT Training
1) Prediction Objectives: As introduced above, the analyses
for post-contingency VMV, TV and VS problems are conducted
in VSAT, which uses a static analysis method to assess system
behavior. Once a contingency occurs, e.g., loss of one or more
branches, VSAT resolves the power flow without the faulted
 DIAO et al.: DESIGN OF A REAL-TIME SECURITY ASSESSMENT TOOL
branch(es) and checks different system states against the de-
fined secure ranges for VMV and TV verification. If the power
flow fails to converge, a voltage instability result will be de-
clared and this is the main criterion for VS assessment. In order
to effectively quantify the impact of an contingency on
the system, two performance indices need to be defined for the
VMV and TV problems. The four prediction objectives are pro-
vided below separately.
For VMV
If the voltage magnitude of any bus in the SRP area violates
the range 0.93 p.u.–1.1 p.u. following a branch outage, this
case is considered voltage magnitude insecure. Its impact
is quantified using a performance index, PI_vmv, defined
in the following [21]:
(7)
where is the total number of buses with voltage mag-
nitude violated in the SRP area; is the difference
between the post-contingency voltage magnitude and
1.0 p.u.; and is the maximum allowable voltage
magnitude deviation. If the voltage magnitude of a bus in
SRP is 1.15 p.u., the performance index value of this bus
is calculated as
Under the condition that all the bus voltage magnitudes are
within the normal range after an contingency occurs,
the index value will be zero. In contrast, if voltage magni-
tudes on many buses violate the secure range, a very large
index value is attained. Such a definition provides system
operators a clearer view of the severity of a contingency at
the current operating condition.
For TV
If the current magnitude on any branch in the SRP area ex-
ceeds 100% of its short term thermal rating after a single
line outage, this simulation case is considered thermal in-
secure. A second performance index, PI_ol, is defined as
follows:
(8)
where is the total number of overloaded branches in the
SRP area after losing a single branch; is the post-
contingency current magnitude on the overloaded branch
; and is the magnitude of the current rating of the
branch . If there are no overloaded lines, this index is zero.
If many branches are overloaded, this index will be very
large.
For VS
If a contingency at an OC causes the divergence of power
flow analysis, this simulation case is considered voltage
instability.
For TS
The transient stability criterion is selected as the “angle
stability margin,” defined in TSAT.
Authorized licensed use limited to: INDIAN INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY MADRAS. Downloaded on March 27,2023 at 05:00:42 UTC from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply.
961
2) Predictor Selection: Since the main objective of the pro-
posed scheme is to predict whether a certain contingency can
cause various security problems at the current OC, the predic-
tors should contain sufficient information that accurately cap-
tures real-time system behavior following contingencies. As a
consequence, three types of predictors are used in this work.
The first one is the contingency ID representing different
and contingencies. The second type is taken from the
pre-disturbance system attributes that are directly measured by
PMUs because PMUs have the capability of simultaneously ob-
serving system states across a wide area in a much faster and
more accurate manner compared to the traditional supervisory
control and data acquisition (SCADA) system. These predictors
include voltage phase angle difference among different PMU
buses (A_x_y), active power flow (P_x_y), reactive power flow
(Q_x_y) and current flow (I_x_y) on PMU-measured transmis-
sion lines. x and y are bus numbers where PMUs are installed.
A third type of predictors includes the real-time active power
outputs of generators, because the generation pattern also plays
a critical role in determining system security. In addition, the
active power outputs can be used to design preventive controls,
as discussed in Section V.
In the SRP system, the candidate predictors include all the
measurements from the 33 available PMU buses, 82 PMU-mon-
itored transmission lines and 116 generators monitored by SRP.
Since the proposed scheme collects pre-contingency system at-
tributes, the four databases created for the four security issues
share the same predictors.
3) Database Building: The creation of each database for DT
training considers an important improvement that deletes the
contingencies in the contingency lists that never cause system
insecurity at any of the considered OCs (Noc). Such a database
only keeps the critical contingencies (Ncc) that have the possi-
bility to cause insecurity. This helps to reduce redundancy and
improve efficiency. The database therefore contains
cases for DT training.
III. TEST RESULTS
A. VMV and TV Assessment
Security analyses using the contingency list for VMV
and TV assessment are conducted in VSAT on the created 476
OCs. A total number of simulations are there-
fore conducted offline. Each simulation case has two results in
terms of VMV and TV assessment individually. The simulation
results indicate that only four contingencies have the pos-
sibility to cause the VMV problem and there are 40 contingen-
cies that can initiate thermal violation problems. At peak load
conditions, more contingencies will cause problems; while at
light load conditions, fewer of these contingencies cause trou-
bles. Two critical contingency lists are built to store the critical
contingencies for VMV and TV assessment respectively. Thus,
two databases including DB_VMV with cases
and DB_TV with cases are separately built
for DT training.
In CART, two optimal regression trees RT_VMV and RT_TV
are trained by setting the testing method to “randomly select
20% of the cases as a test set”, whose performances on the whole
databases are given in Table I.
 962
TABLE I
PERFORMANCE OF RTS FOR VMV AND TV ASSESSMENT
Fig. 5. Nomogram determined by the top system attributes in RT_VMV.
One feasible measure of a regression tree model is the root
mean square (RMS) error defined as
(9)
where is the total number of cases to be tested in a database;
is the actual value of the performance index of the th case in
the database; and is the predicted value of the performance
index for the th case correspondingly. The testing results on the
whole databases provide a RMS error value of 0.115 for VMV
assessment and 0.138 for TV assessment, indicating a high pre-
diction accuracy level. In addition, a nomogram is created using
the critical system attributes for VMV assessment in Fig. 5. Dif-
ferent operating regions are determined in the nomogram with
an average VMV severity level in case of the corresponding con-
tingencies.
It is important to note that larger regression tree models can
yield higher accuracy for the created DBs, but they may not per-
form well on the changed OCs due to the over-fitting problem.
In addition, their complexity is much higher than smaller trees
(more than 100 terminal nodes). A compromise between com-
plexity and accuracy is made here to obtain the final DT models.
B. VS and TS Assessment
Due to the fact that the assessment result of a stability sim-
ulation case is either secure or insecure, classification trees are
trained for this objective. The list of 181 contingencies
( , 3 or 4) is used to evaluate voltage stability and transient
stability in the SRP area. Thus, a total number of
simulations are conducted in VSAT and TSAT separately
to assess the two objectives for the whole day. The provided dy-
namic data file containing all the available generators, exciters,
Authorized licensed use limited to: INDIAN INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY MADRAS. Downloaded on March 27,2023 at 05:00:42 UTC from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply.
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON POWER SYSTEMS, VOL. 25, NO. 2, MAY 2010
Fig. 6. Nomogram determined by the top system attributes in CT_VS.
TABLE II
PERFORMANCE OF CT_VS AND CT_TS ON THE LEARNING SET AND TEST SET
power system stabilizers (PSSs) and other control devices in the
whole WECC system is used to run time-domain simulations.
The results indicate there are six critical contingencies that
can lead to voltage instability at the 476 OCs. Besides, three
contingencies can initiate transient instability and they
are all related to the loss of big power plants. At higher load
conditions, these contingencies are more likely to cause tran-
sient instability because the involved generators output more
active power during peak load periods. Correspondingly, two
databases, DB_VS containing cases and DB_TS
consisting of 1428 cases are generated to train classification
trees.
Similarly, 20% of the cases are randomly selected as a test set
in CART therefore two optimal classification trees CT_VS and
CT_TS are trained for the assessment of voltage stability and
transient stability respectively. By testing this tree model on the
created DBs, it can be observed that very high prediction accu-
racy is achieved as shown in Table II. In CT_VS, 19 PMU mea-
surements are used for online application and in CT_TS there
are three PMU measurements selected. As an example, a nomo-
gram determined by the top system attributes in CT_VS is drawn
in Fig. 6 to assess voltage stability online.
IV. ROBUSTNESS TEST AND ENHANCEMENT
Robustness serves as another very important measure to
judge the goodness of fit of a predictive model for real-time
application. In the previous section, the offline trained decision
trees exhibit excellent prediction ability for the offline created
databases. However, in terms of statistical analysis, the proce-
dure to form the test sets may be biased because all the cases
in the test sets and learning sets come from the same number
of OCs generated. This section is therefore designed to test the
robustness of offline trained DT models using OCs not used for
 DIAO et al.: DESIGN OF A REAL-TIME SECURITY ASSESSMENT TOOL
TABLE III
PERFORMANCE OF CT_VS ON THE NEW DATABASE FOR 288 OCS
DT training. An approach to improve the DT performance on
the totally unforeseen cases is also tested.
A. Generation of Changed OCs
In order to achieve this goal, a new set of OCs are generated
by randomly changing the load levels in the SRP area. This step
accounts for the forecasting error of the load levels during the
next day. For each of the 96 basic OCs, three additional OCs are
generated by randomly changing the SRP loads within 90% to
110% of their original values. The following equations are used
to modify the loads to their desired levels:
(10)
(11)
(12)
(13)
(14)
(15)
where is the bus number where a load is connected; is the
number of the current OC. The subscripts _high, _low and _0
refer to upper limit, lower limit and the original values, respec-
tively; and are randomly generated numbers ranging from 0
to 1. In these new OCs, the status of transmission lines and trans-
formers are not changed; but generator power outputs, shunt el-
ements and transformer tap ratios in the SRP area are adjusted
if necessary in order to ensure that all of the system states are
working within normal limits. As a result, 288 additional OCs
are generated to test the robustness of the previously trained
DT models using the four critical contingency lists obtained in
Section III.
B. Offline DT Performance
For VMV and TV
The new databases for VMV and TV assessment using the
288 OCs (DB_VMV’ and DB_TV’) contain
cases and cases, respectively.
After dropping the two databases down the regression tree
models, RT_VMV and RT_TV, the RMS errors are 0.178
and 0.165, respectively.
For VS and TS
For the VS test, the 288 changed OCs are used to run
voltage stability simulations at the six critical contingen-
cies causing voltage instability. A database with
cases is used to test the decision tree model, CT_VS.
The test result is shown in Table III. The overall accuracy
on this new DB is 96.41%.
Similarly, the offline trained classification tree for transient
stability assessment, CT_TS, is tested on a new DB created from
Authorized licensed use limited to: INDIAN INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY MADRAS. Downloaded on March 27,2023 at 05:00:42 UTC from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply.
963
TABLE IV
PERFORMANCE OF CT_TS ON THE NEW DATABASE FOR 288 OCS
the simulation results on the 288 OCs. Its performance is shown
in Table IV. The overall prediction accuracy is 98.26%.
C. Performance Enhancement
The tests above show good prediction performance of DTs
on the unforeseen OCs, although the accuracy is not as high as
those reported in Section III. The observed drop in the accuracy
is reasonable because the new databases for the 288 changed
OCs are not used for DT training. In fact, there are several fac-
tors that affect the performance of DT models on the unseen
cases.
1) The similarity between the cases for DT training and the
ones for testing.
2) The over-fitting problem is a common problem in the
field of machine learning techniques, which usually uses
too many predictors (compared to the useful information
that they carry) to derive a model with high complexity.
As introduced in [14], the “ -fold cross validation” approach
provides a promising approach to improve accuracy by training
a comprehensive DT model from multiple training processes
for a given database. This method divides the whole database
into groups with equal number of cases. Each subgroup of
cases is used once as a test set to test the DT model while the
remaining groups form the learning set for DT growing.
The training process is repeated times and a comprehensive
DT model will be attained as the final optimal tree for online
application. This idea is tested in this section by setting ,
which is industrial commonly used standard.
The efforts in Section III are then repeated by changing the
DT testing method to “ -fold cross validation” in CART, instead
of randomly selecting 20% of the cases as a test set. As a con-
sequence, four re-trained decision trees including RT_VMV’,
RT_TV’, CT_VS’ and CT_TS’ are created. They are then tested
on the four databases created for the 288 changed OCs. All of
the re-trained DTs show improved performance on the unseen
cases, as shown in Table V. From the performance compar-
ison between the two different DT training methods, it is rec-
ommended to use the “ -fold cross validation method” for DT
training which can effectively enhance the prediction accuracy
on the totally unseen data.
V. SECURITY BOUNDARY VISUALIZATION
FOR PREVENTIVE CONTROL
In this section, a decision tree based approach to visualize
the security boundary is proposed to prevent system insecurity.
This method first chooses a few controllable system attributes
selected by the offline trained DTs, as the only contributors to
be tuned during the preventive control process. The selected at-
tributes are then changed step by step to cover an evenly-dis-
tributed data space for security analyses. Classification trees are
then trained to identify the security boundary for the purpose
 964
TABLE V
DT PERFORMANCE COMPARISON ON THE 288 CHANGED OCS
of separating secure cases from insecure ones. The obtained
boundary is finally used as a guide to design preventive con-
trol strategies.
This section uses one critical contingency that may cause
voltage stability as an example to explain the detailed procedure.
The design of preventive controls for the transient stability can
follow steps similar to those discussed below.
A. Contingency Example
The example chosen is the loss of two 500-kV lines in the SRP
area which is the No. 9 contingency in the critical contingency
list for VS assessment. It may cause voltage instability at some
of the 476 basic OCs.
B. Key Attributes
The main goal of preventive controls is to maneuver the
system attributes away from the voltage insecure region in case
of a critical contingency. Therefore, the selection of predictors
for preventive control should be directly controlled by system
operators. The critical attributes that affect power flow solution
are the load levels and generator power outputs. Since shedding
the loads at the current OC before a critical contingency is
not a recommended choice to ensure system security, tuning
the active power outputs from generators becomes the only
possible and practical approach to design preventive controls.
Shedding loads can also serve as an effective corrective control
action if a voltage instability result is predicted after a contin-
gency actually occurs. The topic of corrective control design is
beyond the scope of this effort and not discussed here.
A subset of the database DB_VS consisting of all the simula-
tion cases for contingency No. 9 is filtered, with the predictors to
be the outputs of all the generators provided. Training a deci-
sion tree on this small database identifies three critical machines
that affect voltage stability caused by this contingency most di-
rectly, which are PG_15147_1, PG_15918_1 and PG_15169_1.
One of the insecure OCs is randomly picked (e.g., OC237)
as an example to demonstrate the procedure for applying pre-
ventive control. At this OC, all the other system attributes are
kept constant except the power outputs of the three generators
and the swing bus. The three generators are tuned one after an-
other to evenly cover the 3 dimensional data space. The scanning
step length is set as 30 MW and the machine output limits are
enforced. For each generated data point, a power flow solution
is obtained in PSAT and VSAT is used to run voltage stability
Authorized licensed use limited to: INDIAN INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY MADRAS. Downloaded on March 27,2023 at 05:00:42 UTC from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply.
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON POWER SYSTEMS, VOL. 25, NO. 2, MAY 2010
Fig. 7. Visualization of the security boundary for preventive control.
analysis for this specific contingency. In this way, 1331 oper-
ating conditions are created with their simulation results shown
in Fig. 7. The database created from these OCs is then used to
train a classification tree for identifying the security boundary.
C. Security Boundary Identification
From the shape of the security boundary observed in Fig. 7,
linear combinations of predictors for splitting are used to train
a classification tree [16]. The optimal decision tree model pro-
vides a flat surface defined by the three generators:
By using this linear split, most of the secure cases have been
successfully classified. Although a few insecure cases are mis-
classified, such a boundary can still serve as a good guide for
preventive control by simply increasing the threshold to a higher
level (e.g., from 253.3 to 280). The shifted boundary will be
more conservative and guarantees that all of the cases in this re-
gion are secure. The main reason for the observed uncertainty
between the two surfaces is that decision tree methodology only
uses linear splits to split the data space, which may not work
very well when the boundary exhibits some nonlinear charac-
teristics. In addition, the uncertainty may be caused due to nu-
merical errors when solving the power flow. A degree of conser-
vatism is recommended by allowing a small margin away from
the determined security boundary. With this choice of boundary,
additional constraints (like the lowest economical cost) can be
considered to obtain the optimal point to be tuned to.
VI. CONCLUSION AND FUTURE WORK
This paper proposes a decision tree assisted scheme for on-
line security assessment. By exhaustive offline simulations on
the forecasted operating conditions a day ahead, regression trees
are trained to assess voltage magnitude violation and thermal vi-
olation problem following contingencies. Classification
trees are trained for the real-time assessment of voltage stability
and transient stability problems following contingencies.
This scheme is tested on the SRP power system using the real
time OCs during the day July 21, 2008. From the test results,
 DIAO et al.: DESIGN OF A REAL-TIME SECURITY ASSESSMENT TOOL
properly trained decision trees perform very well to assess dif-
ferent security issues in a near real time manner. The offline
trained DTs select critical system attributes as good system se-
curity indicators and help to build online nomograms for situa-
tional awareness enhancement. Robustness of the offline trained
DTs is also tested on new OCs around the basic OCs. It is proved
that “ -fold cross validation” is a good measure to attenuate
the over-fitting problem and train DT models for online applica-
tion. Finally, decision trees are also used to visualize the security
boundary for a particular contingency that may cause voltage
instability. The boundary can be used as an effective guide to
design preventive controls to ensure system security.
In this effort, a static analysis approach in VSAT is used to
evaluate voltage stability. In future work, time domain simula-
tions can be used as an alternative in order to obtain a more re-
liable and comprehensive assessment result. More realistic load
models, especially for the motors, should be considered. The
PMU location selection in this paper comes from the actual lo-
cations of 33 PMUs in the SRP system. With the current se-
lection, the test results have shown quite high prediction accu-
racy. Whether the signals from these PMUs are sufficient to sup-
port this online scheme at future OCs (e.g., in several months
or several years) requires further investigation. If more PMUs
are needed, the topic of minimal PMU set and optimal PMU
location becomes another important aspect to be addressed in
order to reduce investment while ensuring DT accuracy and ro-
bustness. The idea of tuning generator active power outputs for
preventive controls needs to be extended to allow multi-contin-
gency conditions. If the security boundary is highly nonlinear,
piece-wise linearization of DTs will be used to approximate the
nonlinear surface. Meanwhile, additional constraints like mini-
mizing the rescheduling cost and the generator rescheduling ca-
pacity need to be considered to find the optimal preventive con-
trol strategy.
REFERENCES
[1] Final Report on the August 14th Blackout in the United States and
Canada: Causes and Recommendations, U.S.—Canada Power System
Outage Task Force. [Online]. Available: https://reports.energy.gov/.
[2] L. A. Wehenkel, Automatic Learning Techniques in Power Systems.
Norwell, MA: Kluwer, 1998.
[3] L. Wehenkel, T. V. Cutsem, and M. Ribbens-Pavella, “An artificial in-
telligence framework for on-line transient stability assessment of power
systems,” IEEE Trans. Power Syst., vol. 4, no. 2, pp. 789–800, May
1989.
[4] L. Wehenkel and M. Pavella, “Decision trees and transient stability of
electric power systems,” Automatica, vol. 27, no. 1, pp. 115–134, Jan.
1991.
[5] S. Rovnyak, S. Kretsinger, J. Thorp, and D. Brown, “Decision trees for
real-time transient stability prediction,” IEEE Trans. Power Syst., vol.
9, no. 3, pp. 1417–1426, Aug. 1994.
[6] T. Cutsem, L. Wehenkel, M. Pavella, B. Heilbronn, and M. Goubin,
“Decision tree approaches to voltage security assessment,” Proc. Inst.
Elect. Eng., vol. 140, no. 3, pp. 189–198, May 1993.
[7] R. F. Nuqui, A. G. Phadke, R. Schulz, and N. Bhatt, “Fast on-line
voltage security monitoring using synchronized phasor measurements
and decision trees,” in Proc. IEEE Power Eng. Soc. Winter Meeting,
Jan. 2001, vol. 3, pp. 1347–1352.
Authorized licensed use limited to: INDIAN INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY MADRAS. Downloaded on March 27,2023 at 05:00:42 UTC from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply.
965
[8] S. Rovnyak, C. Taylor, and Y. Sheng, “Decision trees using apparent re-
sistance to detect impending loss of synchronism,” IEEE Trans. Power
Del., vol. 15, no. 4, pp. 1157–1162, Oct. 2000.
[9] R. Diao, V. Vittal, K. Sun, S. Kolluri, S. Mandal, and F. Galvan,
“Decision tree assisted controlled separation for preventing cascading
events,” in Proc. IEEE/PES Power Systems Conf. Expo., Seattle, WA,
Mar. 2009.
[10] N. Senroy, G. T. Heydt, and V. Vittal, “Decision tree assisted controlled
islanding,” IEEE Trans. Power Syst., vol. 21, no. 4, pp. 1790–1797,
Nov. 2006.
[11] K. Sun, S. Likhate, V. Vittal, V. Kolluri, and S. Mandal, “An online
dynamic security assessment scheme using phasor measurements and
decision trees,” IEEE Trans. Power Syst., vol. 22, no. 4, pp. 1935–1943,
Nov. 2007.
[12] R. Diao, K. Sun, V. Vittal, R. O’Keefe, M. R. N. Bhatt, D. Stradford,
and S. Sarawgi, “Decision tree based online voltage security assess-
ment using PMU measurements,” IEEE Trans. Power Syst., vol. 24,
no. 2, pp. 832–839, May 2009.
[13] I. H. Witten and E. Frank, Data Mining-Practical Machine Learning
Tools and Techniques. San Francisco, CA: Elsevier, 2005.
[14] L. Breiman, J. Friedman, R. A. Olshen, and C. J. Stone, Classification
and Regression Trees. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1984.
[15] Salford Systems, CART. [Online]. Available: http://www.salford-sys-
tems.com/cart.php.
[16] CART for Windows V5.0—User’s Guide. San Diego, CA: Salford
Systems.
[17] DSATools Dynamic Security Assessment Software. [Online]. Avail-
able: http://www.dsatools.com/.
[18] P. M. Anderson and A. A. Fouad, Power System Control and Stability,
Second ed. Piscataway, NJ: IEEE/Wiley, 2003.
[19] C. W. Taylor, Power System Voltage Stability. New York: McGraw-
Hill, 1994.
[20] T. V. Cutsem and C. Vournas, Voltage Stability of Electric Power Sys-
tems. Norwell, MA: Kluwer, 1998.
[21] A. J. Wood and B. F. Wollenberg, Power Generation, Operation and
Control. New York: Wiley, 1996.
Ruisheng Diao (S’08) received the B.S. and M.S. degrees in the Department of
Electrical Engineering of Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China, in 2004 and
2006, respectively, and the Ph.D. degree in the Department of Electrical Engi-
neering of Arizona State University, Tempe, in 2009.
He is currently with Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), Rich-
land, WA, as a Power System Research Engineer. His research interests include
power system stability and control, online security assessment, integration of
renewable energy, and power system dynamic behavior.
Vijay Vittal (S’78–F’97) received the B.E. degree in electrical engineering from
the B.M.S. College of Engineering, Bangalore, India, in 1977, the M.Tech. de-
gree from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, India, in 1979, and the
Ph.D. degree from Iowa State University, Ames, in 1982.
Dr. Vittal is a member of the National Academy of Engineering.
Naim Logic (S’00–M’05–SM’09) received the B.Sc. degree from the Univer-
sity of Sarajevo, Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, the M.Sc. degree from the
University of Zagreb, Zagreb,, Croatia, and the Ph.D. degree from Arizona State
University, Tempe.
Dr. Logic is currently with the Power System Operations Department–Com-
puter Applications Group of Salt River Project (SRP), Phoenix, AZ. His research
interests are in the area of power system state estimation, application of synchro-
nized phasor measurements, and power system reliability.
Dr. Logic is also a registered Professional Engineer in the State of Arizona.