Continuous Surveillance Design For Smart Grid Using Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV)

Abstract

A smart grid is a widely distributed engineering system with overhead transmission lines. Physical damage to those power lines, from natural calamities or technical failures, will disrupt the functional integrity of the grid. To ensure system recovery, the grid operator must immediately take steps to nullify the impacts. Emerging unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) show great potential to replace traditional human patrols for regularly monitoring critical situations involving the safety of the grid. The critical lines can be monitored by a fleet of UAVs to ensure a continuous resilient surveillance system. The proposed approach first considers the n-1 contingency analysis to find the criticality of a transmission line from its performance index, which is calculated using linear sensitivity factors. We divide a line into smaller segments forming multiple inspection points on the line. Then, we propose a formal framework that verifies whether a given set of UAVs can perform continuous surveillance of the grid satisfying various requirements, particularly the monitoring and resiliency specifications. The verification process ultimately provides a trajectory plan for the UAVs, including the refueling schedules. The resiliency requirement of inspecting a point is expressed in terms of a k-property specifying that if k UAVs fail or compromised still there is a UAV to collect the data at the point within a threshold time, while the points that are under resilient surveillance cover a required percentage of the grid’s overall criticality. We evaluate the proposed framework on synthetic data based on various IEEE test bus systems.