An Analytic Model-Based Approach for Power System Alarm Processing Employing Temporal Constraint Network

The alarm-processing problem is to interpret a large number of alarms under stress conditions, such as faults or disturbances, by providing summarized and synthesized information instead of a flood of raw alarm data. Alarm timestamps represent the temporal relationship among event occurrences and consist of rich and useful information for alarm processing. However, the temporal information has not been well utilized in existing alarm-processing methods. The temporal constraint network (TCN) is a type of directed acyclic graph suitable for representing temporal logics. Based on TCN, a new analytic model is developed for alarm processing with temporal information taken into account. Three major modules are included in the developed approach or alarm processor (i.e., alarm selection, event analysis, and result evaluation). In the alarm selection module, reported alarms are divided into related groups. The function of the event analysis module is to find out what events cause the reported alarms and to estimate when these events happen. The result evaluation module is used to identify abnormal or missing alarms. Finally, two alarm-processing scenarios of an actual power system are served for demonstrating the feasibility and efficiency of the developed approach.