A Framework for Robust Hybrid State Estimation With Unknown Measurement Noise Statistics

Abstract

In practical applications like power systems, the distribution of the measurement noise is usually unknown and frequently deviates from the assumed Gaussian model, yielding outliers. Under these conditions, the performances of the existing state estimators that rely on Gaussian assumption can deteriorate significantly. In addition, the sampling rates of measurements from supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) system and phasor measurement unit (PMU) are quite different, causing time skewness problem. In this paper, we propose a robust state estimation framework to address the unknown non-Gaussian noise and the measurement time skewness issue. In the framework, robust Mahalanbis distances are proposed to detect system abnormalities and assign appropriate weights to each chosen buffered PMU measurements. Those weights are further utilized by the Schweppe-type Huber generalized maximum-likelihood (SHGM) estimator to filter out non-Gaussian PMU measurement noise and help suppress outliers. In the meantime, the SHGM estimator is used to handle unknown noise of the received SCADA measurements, yielding another set of state estimates. We show that the state estimates provided by the SHGM estimator follow an asymptotical Gaussian distribution. This nice property allows us to obtain the optimal state estimates by resorting to the data fusion theory for the fusion of the estimation results from two independent SHGM estimators. Extensive simulation results carried out on the IEEE 14, 30 and 118-bus test systems demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed method.