Cooperative Change Detection for Voltage Quality Monitoring in Smart Grids

This paper considers the real-time voltage quality monitoring in smart grid systems. The goal is to detect the occurrence of disturbances in the nominal sinusoidal voltage signal as quickly as possible such that protection measures can be taken in time. Based on an autoregressive model for the disturbance, we propose a generalized local likelihood ratio detector, which processes meter readings sequentially and alarms as soon as the test statistic exceeds a prescribed threshold. The proposed detector not only reacts to a wide range of disturbances, but also achieves lower detection delay compared with the conventional block processing method. Then, we further propose to deploy multiple meters to monitor the voltage signal cooperatively. The distributed meters communicate wirelessly to a central meter, where the data fusion and detection are performed. In light of the limited bandwidth of wireless channels, we develop a level-triggered sampling scheme, where each meter transmits only one-bit each time asynchronously. The proposed multi-meter scheme features substantially low communication overhead, while its performance is close to that of the ideal case where distributed meter readings are perfectly available at the central meter.