This article has been accepted for publication in a future issue of this journal, but has not been
fully edited. Content may change prior to final publication. Citation information: DOI 10.1109/TSG.2017.2710134, IEEE
Transactions on Smart Grid
A New Adaptive Dependability-Security
Approach to Enhance Wide Area Back-up
Protection of Transmission System
Manas Kumar Jena, S.R.Samantaray, Senior Member, IEEE, B.K Panigrahi, Senior Member, IEEE
AbstractThis paper presents a new methodology to
adaptively shift the dependability and security bias of the
transmission system protection logic depending on the system
state. Contingencies such as generator outage, line outage and
line fault can induce stressed system condition. Under stressed
conditions, protection logic should be more biased towards
security. Phasor measurement unit (PMU) information is used at
the system protection centre to estimate the system state. A data-
mining model known as random forest (RF) is utilized to
accomplish the task of state assessment (SA). Two different
protection logics are used to make the final relaying decision. The
first protection logic is the existing distance relay and the second
protection logic is based on wide area information. Both the
protection logics are connected though logic gates to make the
final relaying decision. The performance of the proposed
scheme is validated on the IEEE- 39 bus New England system
and 246-bus Indian Northern Regional Power Grid (NRPG)
system. The test results indicate that the proposed algorithm can
help in shifting the dependability-security bias of the protection
logic adaptively, which will help in mitigating cascaded outages
in the power transmission system.
Index Terms Distance relay, line protection, phasor
measurement unit, random forest, variational mode
decomposition (VMD), wide area back-up protection (WABP).
I. INTRODUCTION
M ajor power system blackouts in recent past are reported
to be caused due to protection logic mal-function [1]-
[5]. Majority of those mal-functions occur during stressed
power system conditions. Planned line outage (maintenance),
generator outage, sudden line outage due to relay mal-
operation, line faults are some of the factors which make the
system stressed. Further, loss of security during stressed
condition is more dangerous than loss of dependability [5].
However, the existing protection logics are normally more
biased towards dependability. Thus, there is a need of new
algorithm which can shift the dependability-security bias of
Manas Kumar Jena and B.K. Panigrahi are with Department of Electrical
Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, New Delhi-110016 India
(e-mail: kumarmanas87@yahoo.com, bkpanigrahi@ee.iitd.ac.in).
S.R. Samantaray is with the School of Electrical Sciences, Indian Institute of
Technology, Bhubaneswar, Bhubaneswar-751013 India (e-mail:
srs@iitbbs.ac.in).
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1
the protection logic based on the system condition.
The need of a reliable zone-3 operation of the distance relay
is discussed in [5]. Recent developments in wide area
monitoring, control and protection technology have certainly
enhanced the wide area situational awareness (WASA).
Further, the use of PMU information to enhance the
transmission system protection operation has gained
momentum [6]-[10]. Synchrophasor assisted adaptive reach
setting of the distance relays is suggested in [6]. A
classification approach using support vector machine (SVM)
to prevent relay mal-operation under power swing is reported
in [7]. In [8], positive sequence voltage and current signals are
utilized to locate the faulted transmission line. Further, the
WABP schemes for series compensated transmission line are
suggested in [9] and [10].
The concept of adaptive dependability-security is reported
for the very first time by Phadke et al. [11]. In [12], a decision
tree (DT) model based adaptive dependability-security scheme
is reported. In this scheme, a set of three independent and
redundant relays are used to take the final relaying decision.
Similar attempt is also made in [13]. However, the core
algorithm behind all these relays remains same. That means all
of them work on the basic principle of distance relay. This is
where there is scope for improvement as far as the adaptive
dependability-security based scheme is concerned. Most of the
relay mal-operations are related to zone-3 of distance relay.
Further, the zone-3 of distance relay mal-operate mainly due
to stressed conditions such as load encroachment, stable power
swing and voltage instability [5]-[10]. Thus, if one distance
relay of a particular line mal-operates during above mentioned
stressed conditions, the other two redundant relays will also
mal-operate owing to their similar principle of operation.
However, if the basic algorithm of the redundant independent
relay is such that it is stable during stressed conditions, then
the objective of the adaptive dependability-security will be
fulfilled. This is the main motivation behind the proposed
WABP scheme. The proposed scheme intends to use two
protection algorithms for back-up operation. The protection
logic-1 (PL-1) is the conventional zone-3 distance relay. The
protection logic-2 (PL-2) is based on wide area information.
The remainder of the paper is organized as follows: Section
II discusses the detailed methodology of the proposed scheme.
Development of data-mining models is discussed in Section
III. Results analysis and conclusions are presented in Section
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Transactions on Smart Grid
IV and Section V, respectively.
II. PROPOSED METHODOLOGY
The system can be declared as stressed following any
event which may trigger relay mal-operation. The following
contingencies might make the system stress such as: (i)
generator outage (ii) line outage (iii) line faults. Sometimes,
transmission lines remain out of service because of
maintenance issues and this can be categorized as planned
outage. The concept of relay margin (RM) is reported for the
very first time in [15]. As shown in Fig.1, any contingency
may reduce the RM of a distance relay. Decrease in RM
increases the chance of relay mal-operation. Thus, during
stressed system condition, more bias should be given towards
security aspect of the protection logic. As suggested in [12],
situations in which the load flow converges can be classified
as Normal. However, if the load flow does not converge, the
corresponding state is categorized as Stressed. In addition to
this, large disturbances such as sudden generator outage, line
faults and line outage may also affect the RM of distance
relay. These situations may not create a non-convergence
case of load flow solution; however, such situations are also
kept in the stressed category, owing to their impact on RM
of a relay. In this study, following the contingency if RM of
any distance relay of the transmission system attains 1.3 times
reach setting of the zone-3 setting, then the corresponding
situation is declared as stressed condition. The threshold
1.3 is decided considering the trade-off between frequency
of shifting the bias towards security and the minimum time
required for coordinated PL-1 and PL-2 operation.
The next task is to decide the features which will take part in
predicting the system state. The investigation reveals that the
square of the positive sequence voltage magnitude of
generator buses ( ), change in positive sequence voltage
phase angle of only generator buses
and change in
phase angle difference between any two boundary buses i
and j of any two areas ( ) can help in predicting the
system state reliably. This finding is also logically correct
considering the fact that any disturbance pertaining to real
power flow will affect and ( ). Similarly, any
disturbance which involves change in reactive power flow,
will affect . The reason for considering square of the
positive sequence voltage is based on the fact that any
deviation from 1p.u. gets magnified and this helps the mining
process.
Let us assume that the system under consideration is divided
into different coherent areas. The positive sequence voltage
phasors at the buses connected to the generators and at
boundary buses connecting two areas, are provided by the
PMUs. It is assumed that each area is coherent following a
contingency and the groups of coherent machines can be
found out by applying the existing techniques [14], [17], [20].
Initially, authors used information from all buses of the
system. However, after the rigorous mining process, it was
found that very few PMU information are actually taking part
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2
in system state assessment. The details of the mining process
is explained in the next section. Thus, the next interesting
finding of this work is that the information from only
generator buses and boundary buses are sufficient to declare
the system state. In such situation, the number of PMUs
required will be very less. To summarize the state assessment
process:
Power system is divided into different coherent
areas [14],[17],[20];
PMUs are assumed to be installed on generator
buses and boundary buses;
Features which take part in state assessment are
decided ( , , ) ;
The features are used as input to a RF model (RF-
1);
Criteria for stressed and Normal system
condition are decided;
Development of learning sample;
Training of RF-1 model followed by testing;
Fig. 1. Relay margin of a distance relay
The next task is to develop algorithm for PL-2. Here, we
have used a recently introduced signal processing tool termed
as VMD. The efficient mode decomposition feature of
VMD along with its robustness in noisy environment make it a
suitable candidate for extraction of IMFs of the input signal
[22]. The objective of PL-2 is to correctly identify any power
system event which behaves like a fault condition. Different
power system events such as generator outage, line outage,
line fault etc. often appear similar. This makes event
classification difficult if the raw PMU data is simply used.
However, each event leaves its unique footprint on either the
voltage or frequency waveform of the system. The spectral
modes obtained through time-frequency resolution based
techniques can help in identifying different disturbances
occurring in power system. Thus, the IMFs obtained through
VMD help in deriving the features which are further utilized
to distinguish no-fault situation from fault situation. Once the
IMFs are obtained following the VMD based pre-processing,
Hilbert Transform (HT) is applied to each IMF to extract the
analytic signal. The features selected in the proposed study are
the entropy (E) and standard deviation (S.D) of first three
IMFs of the input signal. It is to be noticed that the input
signal for the PL-2 is only the positive sequence voltage
magnitude of PMUs installed on the generator and boundary
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Transactions on Smart Grid
3

buses. Similar to the state assessment process, the buses to be Thus, the proposed scheme ensures systems reliability.
considered for the PL-2 development, was concluded only
after the mining process. Another RF model (RF-2) is used to
predict the fault occurrence, anywhere in the transmission
system.
Figure 2 shows the flow chart of the proposed scheme. It is
inferred from the figure that there are two protection logics
which drives the back-up protection operation of a
transmission line (PL-1 & PL-2). PL-1 is the traditional zone-
3 distance relay and PL-2 is based on wide area information.
The positive sequence voltage magnitudes of the generator
and boundary buses are passed through VMD based pre-
processing tool. The first three IMFs extracted through VMD
are passed through a RF model, which helps in differentiating
fault condition from other power system disturbances.
However, if the system is in normal condition, the bias should
be more towards dependability. Thus, the state assessment
(SA) algorithm can assist in deciding whether the bias should
be more towards dependability or towards security. If the
SA logic detects that the system is in stressed condition,
then both PL-1 and PL-2 must be connected in such a way that
the overall bias of the protection scheme should be towards
security. In order to achieve this objective, the truth table is
drawn as shown in Table I. The following rules are followed
to build the truth table.
If output of SA is 0, it indicates normal operating
condition. Here, the overall bias of the back-up
protection scheme should be towards dependability.
Thus, the output function (F) should follow operation of
PL-1.
If output of SA is 1, it indicates stressed operating
condition. Here, the overall bias of the back-up
protection scheme should be towards security. In this Fig. 2. Conceptual block diagram of the proposed scheme
situation, in order to get a final trip signal, both the
protection logics PL-1 and PL-2 must provide their
output as 1.
Applying the concept of minterm to Table I, the
expression for the final output signal (F) can be
expressed as (1).
= + + (1)
Fig. 3 shows the k-map for the truth table. The final
expression for the output function is shown in (2).
= + (2)
where A, B and C indicate logical output signals from SA,
Fig. 3. K-map for the truth table
PL-1 and PL-2, respectively.

The gate level implementation of the output function

(F) is shown in Fig. 4.

The proposed scheme utilizes the available wide area

information to assist the existing relay in taking the reliable
back-up protection decision. If at all there is any
communication failure (PL-2 fails), then the existing zone-3
will take care of the back-up protection. Thus, the worst
condition of the proposed scheme is same as the present
Fig. 4. Gate level realization of the proposed scheme
practice i.e. zone-3 will take care of the back-up protection.

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4

TABLE I
TRUTH TABLE
SA PL-1 PL-2 Output
(A) (B) (C) Function
(minterms, F)
N 0 0 0 0(m0)
O
R 0 0 1 0(m1)
M 0 1 0 1(m2)
A
0 1 1 1(m3)
L
S 1 0 0 0(m4)
T
R 1 0 1 0(m5)
E
S 1 1 0 0(m6)
S
E 1 1 1 1(m7)
D

III. DATA-MINING USING RANDOM FOREST

Fig. 5. Single line diagram of IEEE-39 Bus system
RFs are introduced by Leo Breiman [16]. RF is a grouping
of tree predictors. The prediction error of RF reduces as the Thus, in the proposed study, total 10 generator outage cases,
numbers of tree increases. Both regression and multiclass 46 line outage cases and 460 fault cases are simulated at each
classification problems are solved by RF. Recently many operating point of the system. The loads are varied from 90%
power system problems are solved through RF based to 200%. Total 2616 cases are generated out of which 70% of
prediction algorithm [17]-[19]. A RF is a combination of t the data sets are used to train the RF and rest 30% are used as
trees.
= ( ), ( ), . ( )
test file.
(3)
= ! , ! , . !" is a vector of n-dimensional
One of the important characteristics of the RF model is the
where correlation analysis. This analysis helps in deciding the
predictors.
#$ = % ( ), #$ = ( ), #$ = ( )& is the t outputs
optimal input features to be considered in the classification
process. A correlation analysis provides insights into the
of RF. The class predicted by majority of trees form the final
prediction output of RF #( . More details related to RF based
independence of the numeric input variables. Modeling often
assumes independence, and better models will result by using
data-mining approach can be found in [16]-[19]. independent input variables. In the proposed study, initially
112 input features were considered. However, after the
A. Generating Learning Sample correlation analysis, only 28 features ( , , ) are
The proposed scheme is initially validated on IEEE-39 bus retained for the classification process. Fig. 6 shows one of the
system. MATLAB 2015(b) is used for modeling the test examples of the degree of correlation among the input features
system. The single line diagram of the test system is shown in
considered in the proposed scheme (x1 to x10 represents of
generator buses, x70 to x75 along with x78, x79, x80, x81 are
Fig. 5. As shown in the figure, the test system consists of 10

of generator buses and the rest represents

generators and 46 transmission lines, 39 buses, 29 loads. The,
system is divided into 6 areas [17], [20], [21]. PMUs are
assumed to be placed at all generator and boundary buses. In
order to generate learning data set, miscellaneous operating
points are created through load scaling. The system load is
scaled methodically by successively increasing and decreasing
the load at each area of the 39- bus system. For each operating
point, a contingency (generator outage, line outage, line fault)
is simulated. This may lead to either convergence or non-
convergence of load flow solution. All non-convergence cases
are naturally categorized as stressed condition. However,
there are some cases which lead to load flow convergence
with maximum impact on RM of some critical relays of the
system. Those cases are also categorized as stressed
condition.
across
boundary buses). The hierarchical correlation dendrogram
presents a view of the variables of the dataset showing those
are highly correlated are identified. The length of the lines in
the dendrogram provides a visual indication of the degree of
correlation. Shorter line lengths indicate more tightly
correlated variables. Once the highly correlated variables are
identified, then the redundant variables are ignored for the
mining process.
Further, the classification accuracy depends on the quality
of the features taking part in the classification process. One of
the important characteristics of RF is that it investigates the
impact of each input feature on the classification accuracy.
This is useful to know which variable plays important role in

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the classification process. Fig. 7 shows the top down introduction of VMD based mode extraction which assist in
importance of variables according to the accuracy loss when identifying a fault situation from other stressed conditions.

0.04
they are respectively removed from or included in the feature
OOB
set. It is observed from the figure that positive sequence 0
voltage angle difference between boundary buses (x61, x58, x39) 1

of the IEEE-39 bus system plays a vital role in the

0.03
classification process. This is the basis on which the optimal
number of features (information from generator bus and
boundary bus) are selected which take part in the SA process.

0.02
Error
As pointed out earlier, 30% of total data set are kept for
testing purpose. These data set are termed as out of bag
(OOB) data set. Fig.8 shows the error characteristics of the

0.01
RF-1 model. In the figure, x-axis represents the number of
trees and y-axis represents the error rate. It is concluded that
the OOB error stabilizes after around 15 trees.

0.00
x61 0 10 20 30 40 50
x55
x35 trees
x58
x48
Fig. 8. Convergence characteristics of OOB test cases
x39
x68
x66
x79
The three primary steps involved in VMD based pre-
x78
x75
processing are as follows: [22]
x80
x70
x81 (i) modes update
x72
x71 (ii) center frequency update
x2
x1 (iii) dual ascent update
x73
x7
x74
x6
(i) Modes update: In VMD, the Wiener Filtering is embedded
x10
x3
in order to update the mode. The process of updating the
x9
modes is accomplished in Fourier domain by tuning a filter to
the center frequency )*
"
.
x4
x8
x5

"- ())
+,*
$ " ())/2)
./()) 2* +, "- ()) 3* +, " ()) + (4
2.5 2.0 1.5 1.0 0.5 0.0

= ")
(4)
Fig. 6. Degree of correlation between the input features
1 + 28() )*

x61 x58 (ii) Center frequency update: The following equation is used
x39 x61
to update the center frequency.
= "- ())|
: )|+,* <)
x58 x66
x78 x78

)*
"-
= >= (5)
x68 x39
x48 x48

:> |+,*
"- ())| <)
x81 x68
x79 x79
x35 x35
x66 x55
x55 x71
x71 x70
x10 x81
x9 x72 (iii)Dual ascent update: The Lagrangian multiplier is updated
x80 x80
x72
x75
x75
x2
using the following equation.

4/"- = 4/" + @ A./ B +,* C (6)

x70 x10
"-
x2 x9
x74 x8
x5 x1
*
x1 x5
x7 x74
x73 x73
x8 x3
x4 x7
x6
x3
x4
x6 The process of signal decomposition continues till,

" "
B+,* +* /+,* < G (7)
-1 0 1 2 3 4 0 5 10 15 20 25
MeanDecreaseAccuracy MeanDecreaseGini "-
Rattle 2017-Jan-18 19:04:10 Manas

Fig. 7. Top-down importance of the variables according to the accuracy loss *

or misclassification rate reduction The detailed theoretical and mathematical background of
VMD can be obtained from [22].
The proposed scheme uses two RF model to assist the Let, I(J) be the Hilbert transform of IMF +(J), then the
performance of the existing distance relay. The modeling of analytic signal is computed by,
RF-2 is almost similar to that of RF-1.The difference is the

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!(J) = +(J) + KI(J) = (J) expOK(J)Q (8)
= U(V)
where, I(J) = T :W= <@ . P is the Cauchy integral value.
S WV
The instantaneous frequency is computed using the following
equation.
YU( )
YZ( )
1 +(J) Y +(J) Y I(J)
)(J) =
2X + (J) + I (J)
Instantaneous amplitude is computed using the following
equation.
(J) = \+ (J) + I (J) (10)
In [22], superiority of VMD over some of the recent signal
processing tools such as wavelet transform (WT), S-transform
(ST) and empirical mode decomposition (EMD) in terms of
decomposition quality, noise robustness, insensitivity to
sampling frequency is explored. This very property of
efficient mode extraction is used in this paper to assist
distance relay in making a secure relaying decision during
stressed condition. Various events such as generator outage,
line outage, line faults give rise to various spectral modes.
These modes help in classifying different events occurring in
the power system. The different modes corresponding to
different disturbances can be quantified in terms of statistic-
based metrics. In order to achieve the same, the first three
IMFs of positive sequence voltage signal are used. Further,
entropy (E) and standard deviation corresponding to each IMF
are used as input to RF-2. The RF model is built using the
rattle software package [23]. The data collection and training
process remains same as RF-1. Further, 1229 fault cases, 6
generator outage cases and 26 line outage cases are used as
unseen test file to the trained RF-2 model (IEEE-39 bus
system). It was observed that RF-2 provides a high detection
accuracy. (Table II).
The efficacy of RF-2 is also tested for field data available
from the PMUs installed at some strategic locations of
Northern Indian Grid. Training data is generated by modeling
the Northern Regional Power Grid (NRPG) of Indian Power
system using Siemens commercial simulation software
package named Power System Simulation for Engineering
(PSS/E). The reduced NRPG system (220 kV and 400 kV
only) network consists of 246 buses, 376 branches
(lines/transformers) and 40 shunt reactors. The detailed line
data, bus data and the dynamic data required for the dynamic
modeling of the NRPG system are referred from [24].
However, the testing is carried out on a completely new field
data set. An instance of loss of generation is the loss of 2000
MW generator occurred at the Rihand Super Thermal Power
Station (STPS) complex on 1st June 2010 at 23:49 hrs. It was
a case of line to ground fault followed by generator outage.
Details of the above mentioned incident is reported in [25].
Both the incidents are correctly predicted by RF-2. Table II
details the performance of RF-2 with respect to event
detection.
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TABLE II
PERFORMANCE OF RF-2
Line faults Generator outage Line outage
Actual Predicted Actual Predicted Actual Predicted
IEEE- 1229 1218 6 6 26 26
39 bus
Actual 1 1 1 1 - -
PMU
data
(9)
IV. RESULT ANALYSIS AND DISCUSSION
The efficacy of the proposed scheme is further tested for
various operating conditions which led to mal-operations of
the conventional zone-3 based back-up protection logic. The
results are discussed below.
1) Performance during stressed conditions:
The effectiveness of the proposed scheme is verified by
comparing it to the conventional blinder based schemes. Two
concentric polygons blinders are used for power swing
detection [26], [27] and load blinder [28] is used to block
zone-3 operation during load encroachment. The blinder
settings detailed in [26], [27] and [28] are used for the test
system. In case of concentric polygons blinders, the inner
blinder is placed outside the protection zone-3 characteristics.
As suggested in [26], the outer blinder settings are considered
to keep 5% security margin resistively away from the possible
maximum load, and 20% margin reactively away from the
maximum mho relay reach. Settings of the load blinder are
referred from [28]. The maximum slip frequency is considered
to be 2 Hz and the minimum block duration is set to be 11ms
[26].
Load encroachment is one of the possible causes behind
relay mal-operations. In order to observe the performance of
the proposed scheme during load encroachment, the following
steps are followed. Line 26-27 of IEEE-39 bus system is kept
out of service. This is predicted as stressed condition by RF-
1. Thus, the distance relays operating in the system are more
biased towards security. Now, the active and reactive powers
of load at bus 26 are doubled. This caused dip in voltage and
the apparent impedance seen by the relay at bus-29 is shown
in Fig. 9. It is observed from the figure that the conventional
load blinder is unable to block the zone-3 operation.
Similarly, power swing is simulated in the IEEE-39 bus
system by incepting a 3-phase fault on line 26-28 at 10.8 s
followed by opening of the breaker at 10.88s. The
corresponding R-X trajectory for the relay at bus-29 is shown
in Fig. 10. It is inferred from the figure that following the fault
inception, the impedance locus enters the outer blinder.
However, because of instantaneous rate of change of
impedance during fault situation, the blinder setting does not
classify it as swing. Following removal of fault, the apparent
impedance locus reenters the outer blinder at 11.4s followed
by inner blinder at 11.48s. Thus, this condition is incorrectly
identified as an out-of-step phenomena. In both the cases,
zone-3 at bus-29 mal-operates. The performance of the
proposed scheme is depicted in Table III. It is observed that
RF-1 predicted the system as stressed condition. Thus, the
back-up protection operation follows the logic presented in
Fig. 3. As RF-2 does not give any trip signal in both the
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situations, thus the final trip signal is not generated by the

relay at bus-29.
The performance of the proposed scheme is extensively
tested in various operating conditions where distance relay
mal-operations are identified. All total, 2112 instances are
simulated (stressed) where mal-operation of at least one of the
zone-3 of distance relay (of any transmission line) takes place.

Reactance X (p.u.)
The test cases are simulated by initiating different (N-1)
contingencies (sudden loss of generation or transmission line)
and fault situations at various operating points. The loads are
varied from 90% to 200%. The objective is to induce zone-3
mal-operations due to load encroachment and stable swing
condition. Out of 2112 mal-operations, 1194 cases are due to
stable swing condition and the rest 918 cases are due to load
encroachment. It is observed that the proposed scheme could
able to avert 2092 cases of mal-operations. A new index
termed as Blocking efficiency (BE) is introduced in this
paper. BE is defined as follows.
`abcd efghijk al jidcm gcdanijcboaek cpijbiq
BE =
`abcd efghijk al jidcm gcdanijcboaek
(11) Fig. 10. Impact of power swing on relay at bus-29

TABLE III
PERFORMANCE OF PROPOSED SCHEME TO BLOCK RELAY AT BUS-29
Cases SA output Zone-3 at RF-2 output Final output
bus-29
Load 1 1 0 0
encroachment
Power swing 1 1 0 0

Generator 1 0 0 0
outage at bus-
38
Line outage 1 0 0 0
at 26-27

TABLE IV
OVERALL PERFORMANCE OF PROPOSED SCHEME
Stressed PL-1 PL-1 Mal-op. BE of the BE of
scenarios Mal-op. Mal-op. averted Blinder the
(2112) (without averted by PL-2 based proposed
blinders) with scheme scheme
blinders) (%) (%)
Stable swing 1194 606 1190 50.75 99.66
(1194)
Fig. 9. Impact of load encroachment on relay at bus-29 Load 918 513 902 55.88 98.257
Encroachment
We observed that PL-1 declares all 1194 stable swing (918)
scenarios as fault situations (without blinder operation)
whereas PL-2 declares 1190 cases as no-fault scenarios (4 2) Performance comparison between Data-mining techniques:
numbers of mal-operation). When concentric polygon blinders The performance assessment of the PL-2 developed using
are included in the distance relay modeling, only 606 cases of different data-mining tools such as neural network (NN),
zone-3 mal-operations are prevented. Similarly, out of 918 support vector machine (SVM), decision tree (DT) and
load encroachment cases, 902 cases are declared as no-fault random forest (RF) is depicted in Table V (NRPG-246 bus
conditions by PL-2 and only 513 cases of zone-3 mal- system). It is observed that the black box models such as NN
operations are avoided by load blinders. The main drawback and SVM show poor classification accuracy. In particular,
of blinder based scheme is to find the settings for blocking fault cases are mostly misclassified. Even though DT shows
during stable power swing and tripping during unstable power improved classification accuracy, however, it is very difficult
swings. It requires detailed stability studies of the system for for a single decision tree to capture the signature of each and
various contingency conditions [26]-[28]. The proposed every event accurately, particularly when lesser PMU
scheme provides much improved BE compared to the measurements are available. Even though DTs are more
conventional blinder based scheme. Table IV depicts the transparent, authors have opted for RF giving more priority to
detailed results. accuracy.

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8

TABLE V 1) Category I: Unable to provide a bias towards security

PERFORMANCE COMPARISON WITH OTHER DATA-MINING TOOLS
Line faults Generator outage Line outage
when it is mostly desired. This circumstance characterizes
Act. Pre. CE Act. Pre. CE Act. Pre. CE the current protection practice. Therefore, this error does not
(%) (%) (%) go in detriment of any existing protection practice.
NN 10114 8011 79.2 35 29 82.8 106 89 83.9
SVM 10114 8125 80.3 35 31 88.5 106 92 86.7 2) Category II: Unable to provide bias towards
DT 10114 9214 91.1 35 33 94.2 106 98 92.4 dependability when it is mostly desired. A regular practice
RF 10114 10101 99.8 35 35 100 106 106 100 to enhance security is to implement a voting scheme in
Act.-actual, Pre.- predicted, CE- classification efficiency
which redundant relays continuously vote, irrespective of
3) Processing Time:
prevailing situations. Thus, under this type of error, the
The proposed scheme is developed to supervise the
scheme again reduces to current protection practices.
operation of zone-3 of distance relay which mostly operates
The worst possible situation does not deteriorate the
with an intentional time delay of 1-2 seconds to achieve the
performance of the prevailing protection logic and thus, the
coordination [5], [27], [29]. The proposed method is executed
proposed scheme provides a win-win situation. As a last
on a Core i7 CPU with 16 GB RAM running on windows 7.
resort, a solution suggested in [32] can be implemented
The average time required for the VMD based feature
where local event detection logic is applied at the substation
extraction and RF based classification is tabulated on Table
level itself to override the supervision of zone-3 of the
VI. The total average time consumed by PL-2 to classify an
distance relay by PL-2. In order to uphold dependability of
event is found out to be 20.11ms. However, the combined
overall protection logic during stressed condition, PL-1 can
fixed delay (assuming 1012 phasor measurements each of
be associated with a maximum wait timer, tw (tw must be
which is 4 bytes in length and has 10 input status channels,
less than the usual intentional time delay associated with a
which are 2 bytes in length) caused by processing,
zone-3 operation). That means during stressed condition,
multiplexing and transducers is estimated to be 75ms [8], [30]-
PL-1 will wait for a particular amount of time (tw) for the
[32]. The delay caused by fiber optics communication medium
arrival of PL-2 logical signal. If PL-2 logical signal does not
can be assumed to be around 25ms [8], [30]-[32]. Hence, the
arrive by that time, then PL-1 should be allowed to take the
total delay can be approximated to be around 100ms-130ms
decision alone after usual intentional time delay of 1000-
[8], [30][32]. As 1000-2000ms (considering 50Hz system) is
2000ms [5], [27],[29].
a common timer setting [5], [27], [29] for back-up protection
operation, hence, the cumulative response time of 120ms
V. CONCLUSIONS
150ms is acceptable. An intentional time delay will still be
required following the implementation of the proposed An adaptive dependability-security approach is suggested
scheme. for improving the performance of existing back-up protection
TABLE VI scheme. The main contribution of this paper is the ability to
AVERAGE PROCESSING TIME supervise zone-3 operation of the distance relay using limited
VMD RF-2 Total time PMU information. The correlation among different variables
For PL-2 processing helps us deciding the optimal number of features which take
Average 9.58 10.53 20.11
time(ms)
part in RF modeling. When the system is in normal condition,
then more bias is provided towards dependability. Similarly,
during stressed condition, more bias is given to security. The
4) Findings of this research work:
proposed scheme is extensively tested on IEEE-39 bus and
The important findings of the proposed research work are
NRPG-246 bus system. An incident of line to ground fault
summarized below. followed by loss of generation in the NRPG system is also
(a) The proposed scheme addresses two important issues of tested to observe the efficacy of RF-2. Comparison with other
todays complex power transmission system. These are (i) data-mining tools such as NN, SV, DT is also carried out. RF
improvement of wide area situational awareness (WASA) is considered mainly because of its highest classification
(ii) enhancement of back-up protection of transmission accuracy which is very much essential for secured relaying
lines. decision. Further, the proposed scheme is used for back-up
(b) The first part of the scheme, which is development of protection operation which inherently works with an
SA logic, can help in enhancing WASA. intentional time delay of around 1000-2000ms. Thus, the
(c) Use of PMU information from only generator buses and processing time of combined VMD and RF is also not an issue
boundary buses of a system is an important finding of this as far as back-up protection is concerned. The algorithm has
paper. performed reliably for more than 10,000 events drawn from
(d) Further, development of PL-2 is also helpful in assisting combination of actual and test systems. The findings of this
existing back-up protection relays in making a reliable research work can be utilized to improve the situational
relaying decision. awareness which is highly essential to prevent cascaded
(e) PL-2 is also helpful in efficient event detection. outages in todays modern power system.
(f) Adaptive dependability-security approach is suggested.
(g)The proposed adaptive dependability-security scheme is VI. ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
susceptible to two types of errors as follows. The authors would like to thank the authorities of the

1949-3053 (c) 2016 IEEE. Personal use is permitted, but republication/redistribution requires IEEE permission. See http://www.ieee.org/publications_standards/publications/rights/index.html for more information.
This article has been accepted for publication in a future issue of this journal, but has not been fully edited. Content may change prior to final publication. Citation information: DOI 10.1109/TSG.2017.2710134, IEEE
Transactions on Smart Grid
Northern Regional Load Dispatch Centre (NRLDC) of
Power Grid Corporation of India, for sharing the PMU
information recorded in their system. Author M. K. Jena
gratefully acknowledges the financial and technical support
received from Dr. Nilanjan Senroy of Indian Institute of
Technology Delhi, India.
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BIOGRAPHIES
Manas Kumar Jena received the B.Tech. degree in
electrical and electronics engineering from the Silicon
Institute of Technology, Bhubaneswar, India, in 2011. He
is currently working towards PhD degree in the
Department of Electrical Engineering at the Indian
Institute of Technology, Delhi, India.
S. R. Samantaray(M08SM10) received the B.Tech. in
electrical engineering from UCE Burla, India, in 1999 and
thePh.D. in power system engineering from the Department
of Electronics and Communication Engineering, National
Institute of Technology, Rourkela, India, in 2007. Dr.
Samantaray holds the position of Associate Professor in the
School of Electrical Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Bhubaneswar,
India.
He serves as Editor of IEEE Transactions on Smart Grid, Associate Editor
of IET, Generation, Transmission & Distribution.
Bijaya Ketan Panigrahi (SM06) received the Ph.D.
degree from Sambalpur University, Sambalpur, India, in
2004. He is a Professor with the Department of Electrical
Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), New
Delhi, India. His research interests include digital signal
processing, power quality assessment, and application of
soft computing techniques to power system.
He serves as Associate Editor of IEEE Systems Journal.