Identification of coherent generators by support vector clustering with an embedding strategy

Identification of coherent generators (CGs) is necessary for the area-based monitoring and protection system of a wide area power system. Synchrophasor has enabled smarter monitoring and control measures to be devised; hence, measurement-based methodologies can be implemented in online applications to identify the CGs. This paper presents a new framework for coherency identification that is based on the dynamic coupling of generators. A distance matrix that contains the dissimilarity indices between any pair of generators is constructed from the pairwise dynamic coupling of generators after the post-disturbance data are obtained by phasor measurement units (PMUs). The dataset is embedded in Euclidean space to produce a new dataset with a metric distance between the points, and then the support vector clustering (SVC) technique is applied to the embedded dataset to identify the final clusters of generators. Unlike other clustering methods that need a priori knowledge about the number of clusters or the parameters of clustering, this information is set in an automatic search procedure that results in the optimal number of clusters. The algorithm is verified by time-domain simulations of defined scenarios in 39 bus and 118 bus test systems. Finally, the clustering result of 39 bus systems is validated by cluster validity measures, and a comparative study investigates the efficacy of the proposed algorithm to cluster the generators with an optimal number of clusters and also its computational efficiency compared with other clustering methods