The computation of confidence intervals for the state parameters of power systems

Background: In the past few decades, a significant volume of work has been carried out on various aspects of the state estimation problem to estimate an optimum state vector of the power system. This problem has been focused on, in previous studies regarding the computational efficiency and numerical robustness in view to find point estimates for system state parameters. This current investigation, constructed confidence intervals for the unknown state parameters of the system. The research indicates that confidence intervals can yield addition useful information about the estimated parameters. Methods: The feasible interval estimates for the system state parameters have been modelled in this study by considering the random uncertainty in the processing measurements. The statistical assumptions of the measurement errors have been utilized to characterize the probabilistic behavior of the estimated parameters in terms of confidence intervals. The Gauss�Newton algorithm has been adopted for maximizing the likelihood function of the processing measurements and obtaining the confidence intervals. Results: The usage of the confidence intervals was demonstrated through Monte Carlo experiments on a real dataset of the 6-bus and IEEE 14-bus power systems for both small and large sample sizes. The confidence intervals were constructed for the test networks for the sample of measurements 18, 28, 44 and 68 based on the redundancy ratio R. The proposed interval estimates outperformed for the sample sizes of 28 in the 6 bus and 68 in the IEEE 14-bus systems, respectively. The poor performance for the constructed interval estimates have been reported even for the large sample sizes in the existence of contaminated measurements. Conclusions: The results of the study show that the method is effective and practically applicable in the state estimation of a power system. The constructed confidence intervals for the system state parameters adequately perform for the lager sample size. However, the existence of the gross errors in the processing measurements had severe effect on the performance of the proposed interval estimates. © 2016, The Author(s).