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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON POWER SYSTEMS, VOL. 27, NO. 2, MAY 2012

An Alternative Method for Power System Dynamic

State Estimation Based on Unscented Transform
Shaobu Wang, Wenzhong Gao, Senior Member, IEEE, and A. P. Sakis Meliopoulos, Fellow, IEEE

AbstractAn efcient, timely, and accurate state estimation is

a prerequisite for most energy management system (EMS) applications in power system control centers. The emerging wide-area
measurement systems (WAMSs) offer new opportunities for developing more effective methods to monitor power system dynamics
online. Recently, alternative methods for power system state estimation have caught much attention. Due to the nonlinearity of
state transition and observation equation, linearization and Jacobian matrix calculation are indispensible in the existing methods
of power system state estimation. This makes WAMS high performance compromised by burdensome calculation. In order to
overcome the drawbacks, this study tries to develop an effective
state estimation method without the linearization and Jacobian
matrix calculation. Firstly, unscented transformation is introduced
as an effective method to calculate the means and covariances of a
random vector undergoing a nonlinear transformation. Secondly,
by embedding the unscented transformation into the Kalman lter
process, a method is developed for power system dynamic state estimation. Finally, some simulation results are presented showing
accuracy and easier implementation of the new method.
Index TermsNonlinear lter, power systems dynamics, state estimation, unscented transform, wide-area measurement systems.

I. INTRODUCTION

N electric power systems, an efcient, timely, and accurate

state estimation is a prerequisite for most energy management system (EMS) applications in control centers. However,
due to the slow updating rate of SCADA systems (on the order
of several seconds), traditional state estimators based on steady
state system model cannot capture the dynamics of power
system very well. Since the 1990s, phase measurement units
(PMUs)-based wide-area measurement systems (WAMSs) has
emerged, featured with synchronous sampling and high data
updating rates. The emerging WAMSs evoke many researchers
interests on developing more effective state estimation methods
based on WAMS to monitor power system dynamics [1][17].
This is also important for future smart grid to ensure efcient
and reliable operations and controls of the grid. Recently,
alternative methods for power system state estimation have

Manuscript received May 02, 2011; revised August 29, 2011 and October 04,
2011; accepted November 02, 2011. Date of publication December 26, 2011;
date of current version April 18, 2012. Paper no. TPWRS-00404-2011.
S. Wang is with the Center for Energy Systems Research, Tennessee Technological University, Cookeville, TN 38501 USA.
W. Gao is with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Denver, Denver, CO 80208 USA (e-mail: Wenzhong.Gao@du.edu).
A. P. S. Meliopoulos is with the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA 30332 USA (e-mail:
sakis.m@gatech.edu).
Color versions of one or more of the gures in this paper are available online
at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.
Digital Object Identier 10.1109/TPWRS.2011.2175255

been studied; for example, the feasibility of applying extended

Kalman lter (EKF) to dynamic state estimation is discussed
in [6]; supercalibrator approaches are proposed in [8][11]
enabling the state estimation to be performed at the substation
level and then simply synthesize the system state at the control
center. However, because power system state equations are nonlinear and some measurement equations are nonlinear functions
of state variables, linearization and Jacobian matrix calculation
are indispensable in the above methods. Sometimes virtual- and
pseudo-measurement technology must be introduced to access
certain variables of a generator such as its rotor angle and
. For example, when we use
internal voltages
the measured output voltage and injected current of a generator
to solve some observation equations to get those variables,
the observation equations are nonlinear with respect to the
above variables. Although the model quadratization process is
introduced to eliminate the third order and higher truncation
errors in [8] and [12], the computation of Jacobian matrix of
observation equations is still necessary and the second order
truncation error still exists.
It is well known that the linearization and Jacobian matrix
calculation can lead to the following drawbacks:
Linearization is only reliable if the higher order terms in the
Taylor series expansion can be ignored. If this condition
does not hold, the linearized approximation can be poor.
As a result, linearized transformations may produce highly
unstable ltering performance if time-step intervals are not
sufciently small.
Derivation of Jacobian matrices may be nontrivial. Linearization can be applied only if the Jacobian matrix exists.
However, this is not always the case.
Computation demanded for the generation of the Jacobian
matrices and the predictions of state estimation and covariance is large.
In order to overcome the above drawbacks introduced by linearization and Jacobian matrix calculation, we try to develop
a more effective dynamic state estimation method without linearization or calculation of Jacobian matrices. In this paper,
power systems are still modeled as systems with nonlinear state
transition and observation models; and a deterministic sampling
technique known as the unscented transform (UT) [19][22]
is used to calculate the mean and covariance of the nonlinear
functions of state transition and observation models. The performance benets are demonstrated in an example application
showing the ease implementation and more accurate estimation
feature of the new method.
This paper is organized as follows. The theory of unscented
transformations is introduced in Section II. A new lter algorithm based on the unscented transformation is described in

0885-8950/$26.00 2011 IEEE

WANG et al.: ALTERNATIVE METHOD FOR POWER SYSTEM DYNAMIC STATE ESTIMATION

Section III. A new effective state estimation method without

linearization and Jacobian matrix calculation is developed in
Section IV. Then a detailed study-case is presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in Section V. Specially,
the method performance is tested under different disturbances
and data update rates. Finally, some conclusions are drawn in
Section VI.
II. UNSCENTED TRANSFORMATION
UT is an effective method for calculating the statistics of a
random variable undergoing a nonlinear transformation. Supis an -dimensional random variable with mean
pose that
and covariance
another random variable, is
related to through a nonlinear function
(1)
where is a vector of nonlinear functions. With the unscented
of are
transformation method, the mean and covariance
calculated through the following steps.
points (or sigma points)
1) Use (2) to yield
(2)

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4) Calculate the covariance of

using
(6)

As can be seen from the above steps, the mean and covariance are calculated using standard vector and matrix operations;
it is not necessary to evaluate the Jacobians which are usually
needed in existing state estimation of nonlinear systems. This
means that the algorithm can be implemented rapidly and suitable for online application. Moreover, the algorithm can guarantee a higher order of accuracy than traditional linearization
algorithm [20][22]. The more detailed derivation and properties of the unscented transformation algorithm can also be found
in [20][22].
III. FILTERING ALGORITHM BASED
UNSCENTED TRANSFORMATION

ON THE

In the previous section, we introduced a method for determining the mean and covariance of a random vector that undergoes a nonlinear transformation. The method is superior to
linearization methods in many important respects [20][22]. In
this section, we describe how UT is embedded into the recursive
prediction and update structure of Kalman lter.
A system with nonlinear functions of state transition and observation models is shown in (7):

(3)
(7)
is the th row or column of the
where
is the weight which is
matrix square root of
associated with
. Here
is a scaling factor; is another parameter of the method,
if is Gaussian [20],
and can be chosen as
[22]; the matrix square root of positive denite matrix
means that a matrix
exists such that
.
2) Instantiate each point through the nonlinear function to
yield the set of transformed sigma points as shown in
(4)
3) Calculate the mean of
(3):

by (5), where

is dened by

(5)

where
is the state variable at the time step
is the measurement at the time step
and are vectors consisting of nonlinear functions;
is the Gaussian
is the
process noise at the time step , and
and
are
Gaussian measurement noise at the time step
covariance of and at the time step . Using UT described
in the previous section, the prediction and update steps of the
new lter algorithm can be formulated in standard matrix operations [23] as follows:
as the state
1) Prediction: according to (2)(6), use
mean to yield sigma points and calculate the predicted state
and the predicted covariance
shown in (8)
mean
is
at the bottom of the page, where
dened in (3),
is an
matrix,
is an
-dimensional vector.
as the state mean
2) Update: according to (2)(6), use
to yield sigma points and calculate the predicted mean
and covariance
of the measurement, and the cross-coshown in (9),
variance of the state and measurement

(8)

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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON POWER SYSTEMS, VOL. 27, NO. 2, MAY 2012

where
is dened in (10),
is an
mais similar to
trix, the operation of
in (8). Here is a parameter of the method, and
if
is Gaussian [19]. Then calculate the lter gain
and
and covariance
as shown
the updated state mean
in (11):

Fig. 1. Single machine innite bus system.

of the measurement, and the cross-covariance of the

state and measurement
given as follows:
(9)
(15)

(10)

and the updated state mean

4) Calculate the lter gain
and covariance
given as follows:

(11)
(16)

IV. ONLINE DYNAMIC STATE ESTIMATION

METHOD FOR POWER SYSTEMS
In this section, we describe how the new ltering method as
introduced in the previous section is used for power system dynamic state estimation. Power systems can be modeled as a set
of differential-algebraic equations given in (12):
(12)

where is a set of nonlinear functions of state transition;

is a set of nonlinear observation equations; is a set of algebraic equations, representing the passive network of the power
system. In this paper, loads are modeled as constant impedances
and is formulated as a nodal equation with a nodal admittance
can be solved from function .
matrix. Given
Applying numerical integration scheme (e.g., the trapezoidal
method), we discretize (12) and convert it into algebraic forms
at each time step. The ltering process shown in Section III can
be incorporated into power system state estimation as follows:
as the state mean to yield
1) According to (8), use
sigma points and calculate the predicted state mean
shown in (13):

(13)

2) Calculate

Remark: The update rate of traditional SCADA systems is

in (13) is about 4 s. As
about 4 to 5 s. This means that the
a result, dynamic state estimation based on SCADA is prone to
divergence. However, PMUs can send their data at a rate up to
240 frames per second, which lays the basis for the implementation of dynamic state estimation in power systems.
V. CASE STUDIES
A. Case 1
In this subsection, we compare our method with other linearization-based methods. In fact, the new methods advantages
compared with other linearization methods have been studied
in [20]. Here, we show the advantages through a power system
case. For the sake of clarity, we use a single machine innite bus
system to compare our method with the method in [6] which is
based on the linearization. A multi-machine case will be studied
in the next subsections.
A single machine innite bus system is shown in Fig. 1 and
the system dynamic equations are given in (17) where
p.u.,
kWs/kVA,
p.u.,
p.u.,
p.u.,
rad/s.
The system measurement equations are given in (18) where
and
represent measurement noise. It can be seen from (17)
and (18) that both the state transition and observation equations
:
contain nonlinear term

(17)

(18)

by solving
(14)

3) According to (9), use

as the state mean to yield sigma
and covariance
points and calculate the predicted mean

Letting the right side of (17) be equal to zero, we get

rad,
as an equilibrium of the system.
Given
and
s in (13), (15), and

WANG et al.: ALTERNATIVE METHOD FOR POWER SYSTEM DYNAMIC STATE ESTIMATION

945

Fig. 2. Estimated results from the method in [6].

Fig. 5. Two measured variables with noises.

Fig. 3. Estimated results using the new method.

Fig. 6. Estimated result from the method in [6].

Fig. 4. Comparison of estimation errors of the two methods.

Fig. 7. Estimated result from the new method.

(16), we test the two methods performance by tracking system

dynamics around the equilibrium, respectively.
to the equilibBy introducing a small increment
rium, we get
as initial values
around the equilibrium. The system oscillations derived from
these initial values are shown in Figs. 2 and 3. The solid line in
Fig. 2 represents actual values; and the dashed line is the estimated result from the method in [6]. In Fig. 3, the solid line represents actual values; and the dashed line is the estimated result
from the method in this paper. Fig. 4 gives the comparison of estimation errors of the two methods. Both methods use the same
measured values with noises that are shown in Fig. 5 in which

a Gaussian noise with a zero mean and variance of 0.00001 p.u.

to the measured electric power, and another Gaussian noise with
a zero mean and variance of 0.0001 rad/s to the measured rotor
velocity . It can be seen from Figs. 24 that both methods can
work well.
to the equiNow we introduce a larger increment
librium. As a result, we get
as initial values around the equilibrium. The system oscillations
derived from these initial values are shown in Figs. 6 and 7. The
solid line in Fig. 6 represents actual values; and the dashed line
is the estimated result from the method in [6]. In Fig. 7, the solid
line represents actual values; and the dashed line is the estimated

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Fig. 8. Comparison of estimation errors of the two methods.

IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON POWER SYSTEMS, VOL. 27, NO. 2, MAY 2012

Fig. 10. WSCC three-machine nine-bus system.

Fig. 11. Pseudo-steady state phasor diagram for synchronous generators.

Fig. 9. Two measured variables with noises.

result from the method in this paper. Fig. 8 gives the comparison of the estimation errors of two methods. Both methods use
the same measured variables with noises are shown in Fig. 9 in
which a Gaussian noise with a zero mean and variance of 0.001
p.u. added to the measured electric power, and another Gaussian
noise with a zero mean and variance of 0.01 rad/s added to the
measured rotor velocity.
It can be seen from Fig. 6 that a phase shift (lag) emerges
between the actual values and the estimated values from the
method in [6], while Fig. 7 shows that the new method can
still work well. This lag, when the estimated values are used
as feedback signals, can deteriorate controller performance, or
even threat stability of closed-loop systems [24][26].
B. Case 2
In this section, WSCC three-machine nine-bus system [27]
shown in Fig. 10 is studied as a case to test the proposed method.
In this example system, the dynamics of generators are represented with a 4th order model. The state variables are rotor angle
, velocity , and internal voltages
and . Each generator
has its own excitation system which is modeled with state variables:
. The entire system has 21 state variables, and
the state transition equations are given in (19) where
corresponding to the three generators, respectively. The related
parameters can be found in [27]. Now we discuss measurements
for this case study.

We noticed that all generators are non-salient pole generators.

and generator internal voltage
Therefore, we have
can be calculated by
where and are generator terminal voltage and injection current that can be measured by PMUs directly. Similarly, we can obtain rotor angle
by
, and then we can get angle between
and
, which is shown in Fig. 11. Actually, the latest
PMU released in 2006 can measure excitation voltage, excitation current, valve position, output of PSS, etc. [28]. Therefore
state variables of excitation system can be measured directly or
indirectly.
,
Based on above analysis, we choose electrical power
, angle
rotor velocity , generator internal voltage
(indirectly measured) as measurements for each
generator, and the measurement equations are given in (20)
where
and
are algebraic varietc.;
ables depending on predicted state variable
, represent measurement
. Now we test our method by applying a
noises;
disturbance as follows.
Now a three-phase metallic short circuit fault is congured
on the line between bus #4 and #5 at the moment of
s, near bus #4. The fault is cleared after 100 ms via opening of
the circuit breakers at both ends of the line. Then the system
operation mode is changed with loss of the line between bus #4
and #5. Following the disturbance, we get the measured values
shown in Figs. 1214 by adding a Gaussian noise to the time
domain simulation results. All the noises have a zero mean and

WANG et al.: ALTERNATIVE METHOD FOR POWER SYSTEM DYNAMIC STATE ESTIMATION

Fig. 12. Measured values for

G.

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Fig. 14. Measured values for

0.1 p.u. variance for

ance for :

G.

; 0.1 p.u. variance for

; 0.1 p.u. vari-

(19)

Given

Fig. 13. Measured values for

G.

0.01 p.u. variance for electric power; 0.00001 p.u. variance for
; 0.001 rad for ;
rotor velocities; 0.0001 p.u. variance for

in (13), (15), and (16), we use the measured

values with noise to estimate the actual values of state
variables through the new method. The results are given in
Figs. 1518 in which the solid lines represent the actual values
and dashed lines represent the estimated values. The
dynamics of the 2-norm of the Kalman gain matrix is
given in Fig. 19 from which we can see the Kalman gain
decreases as time increases, which indicates a convergent

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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON POWER SYSTEMS, VOL. 27, NO. 2, MAY 2012

Fig. 15. Estimation results for rotor angle difference of the system.

Fig. 17. Estimation results for

Fig. 18. Estimation results for

Fig. 16. Estimation results for

G.

G.

G.

lter. It can be seen from Figs. 1518 that the estimated

values match well the actual values:

(20)

C. Sensitivity to Different Data Update Rates

In the previous subsections, the simulation results are obtained under the condition that the data update rate is 10 ms.
Due to the following two reasons, the method performance
under different data update rates need to be investigated:
1) Sometimes missing measurement may happen in power
system, which means that the lter process cannot obtain
timely update from measurement. Temporary faults in measurement are reected by intermittent data update in the lter
process, which is represented by different data update rates.
2) In real power systems, PMUs send their data at a rate up to
240 frames per second with most typical rates being 10, 30,
or 60 frames per second (for 60-Hz systems). This means that
the update rate in control centers is from 4 ms up to 100 ms.

Fig. 19. Convergence of the 2-norm of Kalman gain matrix.

Therefore the methods sensitivity to different data update rates

is worth further investigation.
Now we continue to study Case 2. Given the noises as
shown in Figs. 1214 and the same disturbance, the method
performance under different data updating rates are given in

WANG et al.: ALTERNATIVE METHOD FOR POWER SYSTEM DYNAMIC STATE ESTIMATION

949

Fig. 20. Performance under the data update rate of 60 ms.

Fig. 23. Dynamics of  .

VI. CONCLUSION
Fig. 21. Performance under the data update rate of 80 ms.

Fig. 22. Performance under the data update rate of 100 ms.

Figs. 2022 in which the solid lines represent actual values and
the dashed lines represent the estimated values. From these
gures, we can see that the method is still able to maintain a
good performance for update rate up to 80 ms for this case
system; the method starts to show deteriorated performance for
update rates beyond 100 ms.
D. Bad Data Detection
Detecting and handling the effects of gross measurement
errors is another important task in power system state estimation. The unscented lter identies the gross errors through
a normalized innovation vector. Each element of the vector
corresponds to a unique measurement. The th measurement
corresponds to the th element shown in (21) where subscript
represents the th time step; subscript represents the th
measurement;
is the th diagonal element of
. The
other symbols are the same as dened in previous sections.
The results from [29] show that the measurement should be
is greater than 1.5:
discarded if
(21)

By letting
in (21), now we test if this index can work
well by adding a gross measurement error 0.05 p.u. to the measured rotor velocity of generator No. 1 at
s. We get
for
this measurement shown in Fig. 23 from which we can see the
gross error can be detected.

This papers main idea is to develop a method to handle

the nonlinear equations in power system state estimation so
that linearization and Jacobian matrix computation can be
avoided, which is necessary in traditional power system state
estimation methods. We propose the use of unscented transform
to calculate the mean and covariance of nonlinear functions
of random variables (which represent power system measurements as nonlinear functions of the power system state). In
the new estimation method based on the unscented transform,
the linearization and evaluation of Jacobian matrices are not
necessary anymore, and only standard vector or matrix operations are involved. Therefore, the method can be implemented
rapidly using WAMS higher data update rates. The method
has been demonstrated with a number of examples. Compared
with traditional state estimation methods, the results from the
new method demonstrate better performance in computation
efciency, accuracy, and convergence. The results and evaluation of the method indicate a promising outlook for online
application.
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Shaobu Wang was born in Shandong Province,

China. He received the Ph.D. degree in electrical
engineering from Zhejiang University, Hangzhou,
Zhejiang province, China, in 2009.
From March 2009 to March 2010, he worked as a
postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Electrical
and Computer Engineering, University of Alberta,
Edmonton, AB, Canada. From April 2010 to April
2011, he worked as a postdoctoral research associate in the Center for Energy Systems Research,
Tennessee Technological University, Cookeville,
TN. From May 2011 to July 2011, he worked as a research scholar in the
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Denver,
Denver, CO. He is currently with the Pacic Northwest National Laboratory,
Richland, WA. His research interests include PMU-based stability analysis and
control of power systems; renewable energy integration.

Wenzhong Gao (S00-M02-SM03) received the

M.S. degree and Ph.D. degree in electrical and
computer engineering specializing in electric power
engineering from Georgia Institute of Technology,
Atlanta, in 1999 and 2002, respectively.
His current teaching and research interests include
renewable energy and distributed generation, smart
grid, power delivery, power electronics application,
power system protection, power system restructuring, and hybrid electric propulsion systems.
Dr. Gao is a Member of the Power and Energy Education Committee (PEEC) of the IEEE Power and Energy Society (PES). He
is an Editor for the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON SUSTAINABLE ENERGY.

A. P. Sakis Meliopoulos (M76SM83F93) was

born in Katerini, Greece, in 1949. He received the
M.E. and E.E. diploma from the National Technical
University of Athens, Athens, Greece, in 1972, and
the M.S.E.E. and Ph.D. degrees from the Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, in 1974 and 1976, respectively.
In 1971, he worked for Western Electric in Atlanta. In 1976, he joined the Faculty of Electrical
Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, where
he is presently Georgia Power Distinguished Professor. He is active in teaching and research in the general areas of modeling,
analysis, and control and protection of power systems. He has made signicant
contributions to power system control and operation, grounding, harmonics,
and reliability assessment of power systems. He developed the distributed state
estimator. He applied statistical estimation methods for improved grounding
system measurements and power quality measurement methods. The work in
this area led to the Smart Ground Multimeter (U.S. patent) and a commercially
available device for grounding system performance assessment. He developed
(with Dr. Cokkinides) the rst GPS-synchronized harmonic measurement and
estimation system, a wide area monitoring system of power quality problems
for high voltage transmission systems. His present research activities focus
on using this technology for advanced and precise monitoring, visualization,
and control of power systems. He holds three patents and has published over
200 technical papers. He is the author of the books, Power Systems Grounding
and Transients (New York: Marcel Dekker, 1988), Lightning and Overvoltage
Protection, Section 27, Standard Handbook for Electrical Engineers (New
York: McGraw Hill, 1993), and the short book (100 pages) Problems and
Concise Theory of High Voltage Systems, in Greek.
Dr. Meliopoulos is a member of the Hellenic Society of Professional Engineering and the Sigma Xi.