Distribution system monitoring for smart power grids with distributed generation using artificial neural networks

The increasing number of distributed generators connected to distribution grids requires a reliable monitoring of distribution grids. Economic considerations prevent a full observation of distribution grids with direct measurements. First approaches using a limited number of measurements to monitor distribution grids exist, some of which use artificial neural networks (ANN). The current ANN-based approaches, however, are limited to static topologies, only estimate voltage magnitudes, do not work properly when confronted with a high amount of distributed generation and often yield inaccurate results. These strong limitations have prevented a true applicability of ANN for distribution system monitoring. The objective of this paper is to overcome the limitations of existing approaches. We do that by presenting an ANN-based scheme, which advances the state-of-the-art in several ways: Our scheme can cope with a very low number of measurements, far less than is traditionally required by the state-of-the-art weighted least squares state estimation (WLS SE). It can estimate both voltage magnitudes and line loadings with high precision and includes different switching states as inputs. Our contribution consists of a method to generate useful training data by using a scenario generator and a number of hyperparameters that define the ANN architecture. Both can be used for different power grids even with a high amount of distributed generation. Simulations are performed with an elaborate evaluation approach on a real distribution grid and a CIGRE benchmark grid both with a high amount of distributed generation from photo-voltaics and wind energy converters. They demonstrate that the proposed ANN scheme clearly outperforms state-of-the-art ANN schemes and WLS SE under normal operating conditions and different situations such as gross measurement errors when comparing voltage magnitude and line magnitude estimation errors.