Title
Spurious Local Minima in Power System State Estimation
Abstract
The power system state estimation problem computes the set of complex voltage phasors given quadratic measurements using nonlinear least squares. This is a nonconvex optimization problem, so even in the absence of measurement errors, local search algorithms like Newton/Gauss–Newton can become “stuck” at local minima, which correspond to nonsensical estimations. In this paper, we observe that local minima cease to be an issue as redundant measurements are added. Posing state estimation as an instance of the low-rank matrix recovery problem, we derive a bound for the distance between the true solution and the nearest spurious local minimum. We use the bound to show that spurious local minima of the nonconvex least-squares objective become far-away from the true solution with the addition of redundant information.
Year
DOI
Venue
2019
10.1109/TCNS.2019.2920586
IEEE Transactions on Control of Network Systems
Keywords
Field
DocType
State estimation,Voltage measurement,Power measurement,Power system stability,Noise measurement
Applied mathematics,Mathematical optimization,Noise measurement,Matrix (mathematics),Quadratic equation,Maxima and minima,Local search (optimization),Non-linear least squares,Spurious relationship,Optimization problem,Mathematics
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
6
3
2325-5870
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
0
0.34
0
Authors
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Richard Y. Zhang1106.92
Javad Lavaei258771.90
Ross Baldick332242.22