Outage Identification from Electricity Market Data: Quickest Change Detection Approach

Abstract: Power system outages expose market participants to significant financial risk unless promptly detected and hedged. We develop an outage identification method from public market signals grounded in the parametric quickest change detection (QCD) theory. Parametric QCD operates on stochastic data streams, distinguishing pre- and post-change regimes using the ratio of their respective probability density functions. To derive the density functions for normal and post-outage market signals, we exploit multi-parametric programming to decompose complex market signals into parametric random variables with a known density. These densities are then used to construct a QCD-based statistic that triggers an alarm as soon as the statistic exceeds an appropriate threshold. Numerical experiments on a stylized PJM testbed demonstrate rapid line outage identification from public streams of electricity demand and price data.