2018 IEEE SmartWorld, Ubiquitous Intelligence & Computing, Advanced & Trusted Computing, Scalable

Computing & Communications, Cloud & Big Data Computing, Internet of People and Smart City Innovations

Deep Learning-Based Online Small Signal

Stability Assessment of Power Systems with
Renewable Generation
Jun Cao and Zhong Fan

Keele University, Keele, ST5 5BG, UK

Abstract — High penetration of renewable generations has I. INTRODUCTION

imposed a significant challenge on power system small signal
stability, as the stochastic nature of renewable energy makes the
uncertainty scenarios increase dramatically. This paper proposes
a data-driven model-free online small signal stability assessment
T HE integration of grid-connected renewable generation has
been increasing tremendously all over the world. Due to the
stochastic characteristics of renewable energy, this has imposed
(SSSA) method based on deep learning. The proposed method can significant challenges for the steady state and dynamic stability
provide real-time small signal stability results based on various of power systems, including small signal stability. The
historical data including wind speed, solar irradiation and power mechanism that renewable generations affect power system
system operation data. The first step of the approach is to carry small signal stability is very complicated, as it influences not
out the small signal analysis using modal analysis (MA) to generate
only the initial equilibrium point (steady state power flows), but
the training database. Then from labeled database and other
historical data, a deep learning based method is employed to learn also the state matrix coefficients of the linearized model [1].
how to make the right prediction of SSSA in real-time, without the The studies [2], [3] show that the grid-connected renewable
knowledge of future wind or solar data. The effectiveness of the energy could have both beneficial and adverse effects on small
proposed method is evaluated and demonstrated in the paper by a signal stability. The increasing penetration of renewables
typical 16-machine 68-bus test system. results in dramatic growth of the uncertainty scenarios, which
Index Terms— Data-driven, Model-free, Small-signal stability, makes this situation even worse. Hence, there is a great need to
Online stability, Deep learning. investigate a fast and accurate online small signal stability tool
to cope with the high penetration of renewables.
NOMENCLATURE Recently, there have been immense efforts in investigating
Indices and Sets the impact of increasing penetration of wind and PV generation
on power system small signal stability. Basically, these efforts
MA modal analysis can be classified into two categories: 1) Deterministic
SSSA small signal stability assessment approaches by using time domain simulation [4], modal
DTA damping torque analysis analysis (MA) [2] and damping torque analysis (DTA) [5].
SVM support vector machine However, deterministic methods don’t consider the impact of
SNN shallow neural network the generation uncertainty caused by the stochastically variable
DNN deep neural network renewable sources. 2) Probabilistic and stochastic methods by
CNN conventional neural network using either non-analytical method, such as Monte Carlo
Relu rectified linear units simulation and stochastic differential equations [6] or analytical
methods, such as Gram-Charlier expansion [7], [8], and
x vector of state variables
stochastic response surface [9].
x renew vector of state variables of renewables
One of the key challenges when using the aforementioned
u input variables model-based SSSA methods is that the computation process is
urenew input variables of renewables time consuming for real large networks, especially using
y output variables probabilistic/stochastic methods, which makes it impossible to
yrenew output variables of renewables implement them in online real-time small signal stability
h( y ) set of equality constraints of OPF analysis. An alternative method is to adopt model-free methods
such as neural networks or SVM [10], [11], which train the
g (y ) set of inequality constraints of OPF network using off-line historical data for different scenarios.
A,B,C,D state, input, connection, output matrices The authors of [12] propose a neural network based critical
b bias eigenvalue prediction method. The proposed method focused
W weight on pre-defined regions, which involves feature selection and
J learning rate region selection processes. Different regions adopt different

978-1-5386-9380-3/18/$31.00 ©2018 IEEE 216

DOI 10.1109/SmartWorld.2018.00072
Authorized licensed use limited to: Qatar University. Downloaded on September 27,2023 at 00:13:37 UTC from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply.
neural networks, which makes the whole process quite
complicated. Another drawback of the conventional neural
network is that preselected input variables may not be
monitored or are extremely hard to measure in real networks,
which makes these methods impossible to implement in real
world. A ball vector machine method has been present in [13]
to do the online small signal stability assessment. Feature pre-
selection algorithms are still needed in the proposed method.
On the other hand, these studies do not consider the integration
of renewable generations, when huge amount of uncertainty
scenarios are introduced by high penetration of renewables.
Currently, deep learning has grown very fast and provides
superior performance for many complex problems in image
recognition, speech recognition, and natural language
processing, due to significant advancements in hardware and
algorithms. Compared with a traditional neural network (called
shallow neural network or SNN), which only has one hidden
layer, a deep neural network has more hidden layers that can be
trained to effectively extract the hidden structure and inherent
features. DNN works in many complex situations because of
the architecture of the network and the optimization routine
applied to that architecture. In terms of deep learning applied in
the energy field, recent efforts are increasingly focused on load
or renewable energy forecasting [14]–[18], feature extraction
from smart meter databases [19], and demand side management
[20]. However, to the best of our knowledge, DNN designed for
online small signal stability has not yet been considered in the
published literature. Therefore, this research is devoted to the
investigation of a deep framework for online SSSA prediction,
when the grid is connected with high penetration of renewable
generation. The main contributions of this paper are presented
as follows: (1) For the first time, DNN is introduced and tailored
to do the online small signal stability assessment for power
systems with renewable integration. (2) Comparison of
traditional SNN and modern DNN is given in this paper.
The rest of the paper is organized as follows. An overview
of the present small signal stability assessment methods is
presented in Section II of the paper. The SNN and proposed
DNN methodology are presented in Section III. A detailed layer
description and related loss function and optimal training
method are introduced in Section IV. Numerical solutions of
one typical 16-machine 68-bus test system are demonstrated
and discussed in Section V. Finally, conclusions are drawn in
Section VI of the paper.
II. SMALL SIGNAL STABILITY ASSESSMENT
A. Model based methods: time domain simulation, damping
torque analysis and MA
The dynamic behavior of a power system with integration of
renewable generation can be described by a set of ordinary
differential equations denominated as state equations, together
with a set of algebraic equations, which are expressed in (1)
[21].
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Small Signal Stability
Analysis (SSSA)
Model Based methods Model-free
Time domain Damping Torque Modal
SVM Neural Network
Simulation Analysis Analysis
Fig. 1 Overview of small signal stability methods.
­[ x, xrenew ] f ( x , xrenew , u, urenew )
® (1)
¯[ y, yrenew ] g ( x , xrenew , u, urenew )
Equation (1) can be solved using some numerical methods
such as Euler’s method, which is the time domain simulation in
power systems. One of the main drawbacks of the time domain
simulation is that often system inherent modes are not visible
or excited in the results.
The modal analysis and DTA methods adopt the linearized
equations of (1) around a system initial point to calculate the
eigenvalue and eigenvectors, as shown in (2). The stability of
the system is determined by some critical eigenvalues, which
are located near the imaginary axis of the complex plane [21].
­['x, 'xrenew ] A['x , Δxrenew ]  B['u, 'urenew ]
® (2)
¯['y, 'yrenew ] C['x , Δxrenew ]  D['u, 'urenew ]
However, the unavailability of a complete set of system up-
to-data parameters makes the modal analysis hard for online
application.
B. Model-free methods: machine learning based methods
Some machine learning based methods such as SVM and
neural networks have been adopted for online small signal
stability analysis. The basic idea is using the history operation
data to train a model, which can be used for online prediction.
The accuracy of the schemes really depends on the network
architecture and training methods. Fig.1 depicts an overview of
different SSSA methods.
III. PROPOSED METHODOLOGY
A. Methodology overview
Fig. 2 presents the global methodology proposed to train an
online SSSA tool which can respond in real-time to the
variations of renewable generations. Basically, there are three
steps of the proposed methodology: data preparation, model
training and real application.
We are using the modal analysis to generate the dataset with
labels. Firstly, the historical wind, solar and system operation
data are treated as inputs to the modal analysis module. To
increase the robustness of the methods, N-1 scenarios are also
included in the operational dataset. Then, the load flow results
and the wind/solar data are joined as the input dataset (X_train).
The system small signal stability results calculated through
modal analysis are stored in the output dataset (Y_label).
Finally, the whole dataset is split into training, validation and
testing sets, where 80% of the data are used for training and
validation and 20% are for testing.
 Historical Historical Power system Feature
N-1 Scenarios Raw data Input data SNN prediction
Solar data Wind data operation data extraction

(a) Shallow neural network

Load flow Perform load flow
results calculation
Feature
Raw data DNN network prediction
extraction
Calculate eigenvalue
Input via modal analysis
(b) Deep neural network
Data
Data
X_train Y_label preparation
preparation Fig. 4 Comparison of SNN and DNN workflow.

The hidden layers normally adopt a rectified linear units

Training dataset Validation dataset Testing dataset
(Relu) g (z) max{0,z} as the activation function.
Deep
Deep learning
learning Comparison of SNN and DNN
Machine Learning algorithms training
training Previous machine learning techniques such as SNN only
involve transforming the input data into one or two successive
Trained small signal stability predictive model representation spaces. But the refined representations required
Applications
Applications by complex problems generally cannot be attained by such
Results techniques. As a result, researchers have to go to great lengths
to make the initial input data more amenable to processing by
Fig. 2 Overview of the proposed method.
manually engineering good layers of representations for their
data.
The key part of the proposed methodology is model training.
Deep learning, on the other hand, completely automates this
Shallow and deep neural networks are adopted and compared
step: with deep learning we learn all the features in one pass
in the analysis. Detailed models are shown in the following
rather than having to engineer them ourselves. This has greatly
subsection.
simplified machine learning workflows, often replacing
B. SNN vs. DNN sophisticated multistage pipelines with a single, simple, end to
Shallow neural network end deep learning model, as shown in Fig. 4. Table I
A SNN is a neural network with only one hidden layer, summarizes the differences between SNN and DNN.
where the hidden layer uses a sigmoid transfer function, as TABLE I
shown in Fig. 3 (a). Summary of SNN and DNN
SNN DNN
Architecture One hidden layer Multi-layers
Activation Sigmoid Relu
function
Pros and Multistage pipelines End to end deep
cons learning model

IV. FORMULATION OF A DEEP LEARNING MODEL

(a)
(b)
Fig. 3 Architecture difference of SNN and DNN: (a) SNN with only
one hidden layer; (b) DNN with multiple hidden layers.
Deep neural network (DNN)
Unlike SNN, modern DNN provides a powerful framework
for supervised learning. By adding more layers and more units
within a layer as shown in Fig. 3 (b), a deep network can
represent functions of increasing complexity.
Nearly all the deep learning algorithms can be described as
particular instances of a fairly simple recipe: the combination
of a specification of a dataset, a cost function, an optimization
procedure and a model.
A. Layer description
Hidden layer
Generally, most hidden units can be described as accepting
a vector of input x, computing an affine transformation
z WT ˜ x  b , and then applying an element wise nonlinear
function g(z). Most hidden layers are distinguished from each
other only by the choice of the form of the activation function.
Traditional SNN uses sigmoid function as the activation
function, which is defined as g (z) ˄1  e z˅-1 . However,
activation functions with saturating nonlinearities can
significantly slow down training with gradient descent or even
cause nonconvergence of the training, which is called vanishing
gradient.

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 Rectified linear units, which use the activation function The system is modified for renewable integration, with one
g (z) max{0,z} , are an excellent default choice of hidden unit wind farm connected to Bus 14 and one PV plant to Bus 15,
for DNN right now. respectively. The penetration of 10% (2100 MW for a load level
Dropout layer of 21,000 MW) is considered for the analysis. A generic model
Dropout technique is essentially a regularization method of Type-3 wind turbine (DFIG) and PV are used [24] in this
used to prevent over-fitting while training neural nets. The paper. Detailed descriptions of these generic models can be
dropout layer randomly sets input elements to zero with a given found in [24].
probability. The random selection is assumed to have a To analyze the variation impact of wind and PV generators
Bernoulli distribution. on small signal stability, historical wind and PV generation data
Output layer are collected from the database of 50Hertz Transmission GmbH,
We often use Softmax as an output layer for classification to which is one of the four transmission system operators for
represent the probability distribution over n-different classes, as electricity in Germany. The dataset contains the total wind and
shown in (3). The final predicted class is the class solar plant generation data over 7 years at an interval of 15
corresponding to the maximum probability. minutes. A total of 245,280 data points for each renewable
exp(zi ) generation dataset are used. The data are normalized to fit for
soft max(zi ) (3)
¦ j zj the NETS-NYPS system.
To accommodate the DFIG and PV to this system, the
B. Loss function generators 8 and 9 in the system are reduced by 10%. Table II
The loss function is a method of evaluating how well your shows the percentage of damping and frequency of oscillations
algorithm models your dataset. The cross entropy loss function for the four inter-area modes (referred to as modes 1–4) of the
is adopted in this paper, which is defined as: system corresponding to the initial operating conditions (the
DFIG and PV are chosen as the mean value of the total dataset).
Ly1 (y) -¦ y1i ˜ log(yi ) (4)
i
The frequencies of the inter-area modes range between 0.3–0.8
Hz. From the table, it is evident that at the current operating
C. Training method conditions, the damping of the inter-area modes 2 and 3 has
To improve the computation efficiency, the SGD (stochastic experienced a very low damping ratio. With the increase of
gradient descent) method is adopted to compute the gradient. renewable output, the damping of the inter-area modes
The insight of SGD is that the gradient is an expectation. The experiences an adverse effect, while some other modes
expectation is approximately estimated using a minibatch of experience a beneficial effect on the specific operating
samples %= ^ x1 , x 2 , , x m ` , drawn uniformly from the training conditions.
set. The estimation of the gradient is formulated as Table II Inter-area mode with renewable integration
m
1
g ’ θ ¦ L ( x i , y i , θ) (5) Mode 1 Mode 2 Mode 3 Mode 4
m i1 Damping 0.035 0.014 0.014 0.06
Using the examples from the minibatch B, the iteration then frequency 0.75 0.53 0.51 0.34
can be implemented as follows:
B. DNN results
θt +1 θt  J ˜ g (6)
Many improvements on the basic stochastic gradient descent Table III and IV summarize the architecture and the
algorithm have been proposed and used, such as AdaGrad, hyperparameters of SNN and proposed DNN, respectively. A
RMSProp and Adam [22]. In this paper, we use SGD with total number of 982 and 3081 parameters need to be trained in
moment. SNN and DNN, respectively.
Table III Architecture of SNN
V. CASE STUDIES Layer (type) Output Shape Param #
In this section, the case studies are implemented by using dense_1 (Dense) Relu (None, 20) 940
Python 3.5.5 in Anaconda environment. The DNN architecture dense_2 (Dense) Softmax (None, 2) 42
is constructed based on Tensorflow 1.8 [23].
Table IV Architecture of the proposed DNN
A. Datasets
Layer (type) Output Shape Param #
Test system
dense_6 (Dense) Relu (None, 35) 1645
The 68-bus system is a reduced order equivalent of the inter- dropout_3 (None, 35) 0
connected New England test system (NETS) and New York (Dropout)
power system (NYPS), with five geographical regions out of dense_7 (Dense) Relu (None, 25) 900
which NETS and NYPS are represented by a group of dropout_4 (None, 25) 0
generators, whereas the power import from each of the three (Dropout)
dense_8 (Dense) Relu (None, 15) 390
other neighboring areas are approximated by equivalent
dense_9 (Dense) Relu (None, 8) 128
generator models, as shown in Figure 5.
dense_10 (Dense) Softmax (None, 2) 18

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 NYPS
14 8

66
A3 1
60
25 26
41 40 48 47 53 28 29
61
2
27
18 9
42 1

17
67 38 16
31 32 30
3 15 24
15 62 63 9
PV 21
4 14
46 10 11 22
A4
33 5 6 12 WF
58
19 23
49 34 36 7 54 11
13 20 6 59
35 64 2 10 56 57 7
8 55
51 45
12 4 5
37 3
A5 50 39
52 A1
44
68 43 65 A2

16 13 NETS

Fig. 5 Single-line diagram of the 16-machine 68-bus test system with renewable generations.
Fig. 6 and Fig. 7 show the model accuracy and model loss of
the SNN method, respectively. After 20 epochs, the system
converges and the model accuracy reaches 99.52%.
Fig. 8 and Fig. 9 show the model accuracy and model loss of
the DNN method with six layers, respectively. After 100 epochs,
the system converges and the model test accuracy reaches
99.89%. As the number of hyperparameters of DNN increases
dramatically compared with SNN, more training epochs are
needed for the system to converge.

Fig. 7 Model loss of SNN.

Fig. 6 Model accuracy of SNN.

Fig. 8 Model accuracy with 6 layers.

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Fig. 9 Model loss with 6 layers.
Fig. 10 Effect of number of layers on accuracy.
Fig. 10 shows the model accuracy results when the depth of
the DNN increases. It clearly shows that the test set accuracy
consistently increases with the layers. However, it should be
noted that when the network becomes much deeper, how to
reduce the overfitting is a big challenge and the training process
needs more data input and more epochs to find the global
minimum.
VI. CONCLUSION
This paper proposes a deep learning based online small
signal stability assessment tool for predicting the influence of
renewable integration. The DNN can automatically extracts the
hidden features from massive amount of historical data. The
results clearly show that with the increase of the depth of the
DNN, the accuracy has improved consistently.
Future work will focus on investigating how the high
penetration of renewables might affect the small signal stability.
Some other deep learning tools such as CNN will be studied to
further improve the accuracy and robustness.
(1)
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