A Resilient Software Infrastructure For Wide-Area Measurement Systems

To support the scalability and resilience requirements of distributed Wide-Area Measurement System (WAMS) architectures, we design and implement a software infrastructure to estimate power grid oscillation modes based on real-time data collected from Phasor Measurement Units (PMUs). This estimation algorithm can be deployed on a hierarchical structure of Phasor Data Concentrators (PDCs), which calculate local estimates and communicate with each other to calculate the global estimate. This work contributes a resilient system to WAMS with guarantees for (1) Quality of Service in network delay, (2) network failure tolerance, and (3) self-recoverability. The core component of the infrastructure is a distributed storage system. Externally, the storage system provides a cloud data lookup service with bounded response times and resilience, which decouples the data communication between PMUs, PDCs, and power-grid monitor/control applications. Internally, the storage system organizes PDCs as storage nodes and employs a real-time task scheduler to order data lookup requests so that urgent requests can be served earlier. To demonstrate the resilience of our distributed system, we deploy the system on a (1) virtual platform and (2) bare-metal machines, where we run a distributed algorithm on the basis of the Prony algorithm and the Alternating Directions Method of Multipliers (ADMM) to estimate the electro-mechanical oscillation modes. We inject different failures into the system to study their impact on the estimation algorithm. Our experiments show that temporary failures of a PDC or a network link do not affect the estimation result since the historical PMU data are cached in the storage system and PDCs can obtain the data on demand.