Estimation of Faults in DC Electrical Power System
Proceedings IEEE Conference on Decision and Control, pages 4334–4339, December 2009.
This paper demonstrates a novel optimization-based approach to
estimating fault states in a DC power system.
The model includes faults changing the circuit topology
along with sensor faults. Our approach can be considered as
a relaxation of the mixed estimation problem. We develop
a linear model of the circuit and pose a convex problem
for estimating the faults and other hidden states. A sparse
fault vector solution is computed by using 
regularization.
The solution is computed reliably and efficiently, and gives
accurate diagnostics on the faults.
We demonstrate a real-time implementation of the approach for an
instrumented electrical power system testbed at NASA. Accurate estimates
of multiple faults are computed in milliseconds on a PC.
The approach performs well despite unmodeled transients and other
modeling uncertainties present in the system.