Data-driven modeling of the temporal evolution of breakers’ states in the French electrical transmission grid

Abstract

In electrical transmission grids, it is common to observe the states of circuit breakers. While they are known at irregular times, system modeling and grid state estimation are of the highest importance to ensure secure operations. This paper proposes a richer method to estimate the grid state over its reference configurations based on the temporal evolution of its breakers’ states. The first contribution consists in developing a general multi-observation continuous-time finite-state Hidden Markov Model with filter-based parameter estimation to infer the hidden state (e.g., the grid reference configuration) handling multiple observed processes with irregular “jump” times (e.g., the breakers’ states). As a second contribution, we build a numerical scheme with no discretization error adapted to all state jumps generated by the observed processes. Finally, we apply our model to simulated and real data to illustrate the approach’s performance. The available data consists of historical records of breakers’ states during the electrical transmission grid operated normally. For this real-data-driven application, we also present a clustering approach to identify the set of grid reference configurations.