Estimation of power system inertia using particle swarm optimization

Power system inertia is being globally reduced, due to the substitution of conventional synchronous power plants by intermittent generation. This threatens the frequency stability of the system and makes the estimation of power system inertia necessary, so that proactive measures can be imposed. A disturbance-based method is proposed in this paper, which estimates the total inertia constant of the power system. The method applies particle swarm optimization (PSO) to minimize a cost function, which is defined based on the swing equation. To do that, data available at the generator buses are employed. The proposed method is applied on the Nordic57 test system under twenty different scenarios, which include generator and load disconnections. Furthermore, a comparison with two methods presented in the literature is performed and demonstrates the higher performance of the proposed method, in the sense of the mean and the variance of the errors.