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Reliability Evaluation of Phasor Measurement Unit Using Monte Carlo Dynamic Fault Tree Method
Peng Zhang and Ka Wing Chan, Member, IEEE
AbstractReliability evaluation of phasor measurement unit (PMU) is a primary key element in the reliability evaluation of wide-area monitoring system (WAMS). In this paper, a comprehensive reliability evaluation method based on Monte Carlo dynamic fault tree (MCDFT) analysis is proposed to conduct the reliability evaluation on PMU. The reliability model of PMU is constructed using dynamic fault tree modeling and analyzed using Monte Carlo simulation to evaluate the reliability indices of PMU. The validity and advantages of the proposed MCDFT reliability evaluation of PMU were veried with simulation and comparison studies. Importance analysis showed that basic components in the GPS receiver and CPU hardware modules have high impacts on the reliability of PMU. Sensitivity and redundancy design analysis are then applied to conclude that the redundancy design of GPS receiver and CPU hardware would be the best measure for improving the reliability of PMU. Finally, a self-adaptive wide-area damping control scheme is taken as an example for the application of PMU reliability. Index TermsDynamic fault tree analysis, Monte Carlo simulation, phasor measurement unit (PMU), reliability evaluation, wide area monitoring system (WAMS).

I. INTRODUCTION S MODERN electric power systems have become more and more complex, there is an urgent need for a real-time wide area monitoring system (WAMS) [1]. The concerns on the reliability of WAMS have been one of the main factors contributed to the slow pace of synchro-phasor adoption for realtime applications [2]. It is now urgent and necessary to comprehensively and quantitatively evaluate the reliability of WAMS so as to ensure its availability and reliability meet the requirements for real-time analysis and control [3][5]. As the phasor measurement unit (PMU) is the core component of WAMS [6], the evaluation of its reliability is a primary key in the reliability evaluation of WAMS. For instance, availability assessments were conducted in [7] for assessing the proposed applications of WAMS in power system monitoring and control but with typical availability of PMU assumed only. Availability and other reliability indices of PMU can be derived either from the statistical data collected in operation or
Manuscript received July 21, 2011; revised November 15, 2011; accepted December 11, 2011. This work was supported by the Hong Kong Polytechnic University under Project G-YG33. The work of P. Zhang was supported by his research studentship awarded by the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Paper no. TSG-00259-2011. The authors are with the Department of Electrical Engineering, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong SAR, China (e-mail: 07901413r@polyu. edu.hk). Color versions of one or more of the gures in this paper are available online at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org. Digital Object Identier 10.1109/TSG.2011.2180937

from a reliability model. As PMU is still an emerging device, available statistical data for reliability evaluation is little and a better alternative would be to rst construct a reliability model of PMU and then to evaluate the reliability indices of this model using a comprehensive reliability method. Reliability model of PMU has been constructed in [8], [9] using the traditional Markov method. In Markov method, the basic components of PMU are rst represented as equivalent two-state models and then Markov state transition diagram is used to depict the logic relationship between PMU and its basic components. However, logic relationship between PMU and its basic components would be too complex to be depicted accurately in the Markov state transition diagram. Furthermore, in order to simplify Markov state transition diagram, only a single fault pattern was considered while multiple fault patterns were ignored. Without an accurate reliability model of PMU, the accuracy of the reliability indices would be compromised. In order to overcome these problems in the Markov method, dynamic fault tree (DFT) modeling [10][12], which can accurately depict the complex dynamic logic relationship between PMU and its basic components, is proposed here to construct an accurate reliability model of PMU in which multiple fault patterns are considered. This DFT reliability model can then be analyzed with various methods such as network reduction method [13], minimal cut sets [14], and Monte Carlo simulation approach [15][17]. Compared with other two methods, Monte Carlo simulation approach can evaluate the reliability indices of PMU more easily and accurately. In this paper, a comprehensive Monte Carlo dynamic fault tree (MCDFT) reliability evaluation method is presented for quantitative evaluation of PMU reliability. The main advantage of the proposed approach is that an accurate reliability model of PMU can be constructed to allow multiple fault patterns in PMU to be considered in the reliability evaluation. Furthermore, more reliability indices of PMU such as importance indices, which cannot be easily obtained otherwise, can be deduced with the use of an MCDFT reliability evaluation method. Through the importance, sensitivity, and redundancy design analysis of basic components in PMU, the most critical components with high impact on the reliability of PMU can be identied and the most effective reliability improvement measures could be deduced. The rest of this paper is organized as follows. The structure of PMU is detailed in Section II. Reliability model of PMU is constructed based on DFT modeling method in Section III. In Section IV, Monte Carlo simulation approach is proposed to analyze the DFT reliability model of PMU. In Section V, a numerical study is conducted to illustrate the proposed MCDFT reliability evaluation method. Section VI presents an example

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Fig. 1. Functional structure of PMU [8].

for the application of PMU reliability in power system stability analysis and control. II. STRUCTURE OF PHASOR MEASUREMENT UNIT Fig. 1 shows the general structure of a PMU with seven function modules including various basic components [8]. Through the PT/CT module (M1), large analog three-phase voltage and current signals are transformed into small analog voltage and current signals which will then be passed to the anti-aliasing ltering module (M2) to eliminate any high frequency noise. The A/D converting module (M3), whose synchronous sampling pulse (SSP) is supplied by the GPS module (M4), is used to convert the scaled and ltered analog inputs to digital signals. In the CPU module (M5), the phasors of phase voltages and currents are computed from the digitized signals and stamped with coordinated universal time (UTC) supplied by the GPS module (M4), and then sent to phasor data concentrator (PDC) and control center by the communication module (M6) through communication network. The power of PMU is supplied by the power source module (M7). Though PMUs designed and manufactured by different manufacturers may have different structures [18], their reliability can also be evaluated by applying the proposed reliability evaluation method, which is not limited to the general PMU structure in Fig. 1. III. RELIABILITY MODELING OF PMU In this paper, DFT modeling method is adopted to construct an accurate reliability model of PMU. In this model, the complex dynamic logic relationship between PMU and its basic components is accurately depicted through dynamic logic gates including sequence enforcing gate (SEQ), priority-AND gate (PAND), functional dependency gate (FDEP), cold spare gate (CSP), warm spare gate (WSP), and hot spare gate (HSP). PMU is a complex device which can be divided into seven function modules based on their functional features. Each module, which could contain a small or large number of basic components, is rst constructed as a sub-DFT reliability model, and then the complete DFT reliability model of PMU is constructed by combining these sub-DFT reliability models. This approach can signicantly decrease the PMU modeling complexity and computational effort required by the following Monte Carlo simulation.

Fig. 2. Sub-DFT reliability model of data collection module.

A. Sub-DFT Reliability Model of Data Collection Module Data collection module (M0) is used to transform large voltage and current signals to small signals, lter noise and random disturbances, and convert the analog input signals to digital ones. It consists of three function modules: PT/CT module (M1), anti-aliasing ltering module (M2) and A/D converting module (M3) as shown in Fig. 1. In each of the three function modules, there are two parallel circuit boards (one is active and the other operates as cold standby). The sub-DFT reliability model of this data collection module is shown as Fig. 2 in which , , , , , , , , , , and denote the failure rate and repair rate of circuit boards in module M1, M2 and M3. In the sub-DFT reliability model of data collection module, dynamic logic gate CSP is used to depict the spare mutual relationship between two circuit boards, which are standby to each other, in module M1, M2, and M3. B. Sub-DFT Reliability Model of GPS Module The construction of the sub-DFT reliability model of GPS module is the key in the construction of reliability model of PMU. Thus, it is necessary to properly analyze the operation mechanism of GPS module shown in Fig. 3. In GPS module, a crystal oscillator is used to supply the sampling clock pulses for the A/D converting module and track the pulses per second (PPS) supplied by the GPS receiver to correct the error between PPS and crystal oscillator frequency. GPS may lose its signal due to many factors such as the poor placement of the GPS antenna, obstruction around GPS antenna, interference, or jammed signal at the receiver from various sources, and so on [19]. When the GPS signal is lost, the crystal oscillator will take over the GPS receiver to supply the synchronous time signal (STS), and the GPS module would enter backup clock operation mode. Under backup clock operation mode, the time accumulation error in STS cannot be eliminated but would be less than [20]. According to IEEE Std. C37.1182005, the total vector error (TVE) needs to be less than 1% which corresponds to a maximum time error of for a 60 Hz system. After the loss of GPS signal, GPS will enter backup clock operation mode

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ZHANG AND CHAN: RELIABILITY EVALUATION OF PHASOR MEASUREMENT UNIT 3

Fig. 3. Operation mechanism of GPS module [8]. Fig. 5. Sub-DFT reliability model of CPU module.

on. The reliability evaluation of software is totally different from that of hardware. Firstly, the failure of hardware is associated with the physical failure, but the failure of software mainly associates with the failure of its function because of the code error. Secondly, due to aging, reliability of hardware will gradually decrease while the reliability of software will increase due to the unceasing optimization of its code. Among all the reliability models of software, logarithmic exponential model is commonly used to analyze the reliability of software [21]. The failure rate of software is given by (1) where is the initial failure rate, is the failure decay parameter, and is the number of failures found. Fig. 5 shows the sub-DFT reliability model of CPU module in which , , and denote the failure rate and repair rate of software and hardware in CPU module. In sub-DFT reliability model of CPU module, basic logic gate OR is used to depict the relationship between software and hardware in CPU module. D. Sub-DFT Reliability Model of Communication Module and Power Source Module In PMU, there are two parallel communication ports which are spare mutually. There is also a standby power source module to improve the reliability of power supply. The sub-DFT reliability models of communication module and power source module are described in Fig. 6, in which , , , , , , and denote the failure rate and repair rate of network ports in communication module and two alternate power source modules. Like the sub-DFT reliability models of data collection module, dynamic logic gate CSP is used to depict the alternate relationship between two communication ports in communication module and between two power source modules. E. Complete DFT Reliability Model of PMU It can be seen from Fig. 1 that the failure of any function module will result in PMU failure. From a reliability point of view, all the modules are called in series. Therefore, basic logic gate OR is used to combine all the sub-DFT reliability models associated with the seven function modules of PMU to obtain the complete DFT reliability model of PMU as shown Fig. 7.

Fig. 4. Sub-DFT reliability model of GPS module.

and synchronous phasor from PMU can maintain its synchronization accuracy for up to 26 h depending on the other sources of error contributed to the TVE before the recovery of GPS signal. Fig. 4 shows the sub-DFT reliability model of GPS module in which , and denote the failure rate of crystal oscillator, GPS receiver, and backup clock operation mode, respectively, and denotes the repair rate of crystal oscillator and GPS receiver, respectively, and denotes the probability of unsuccessful operation of function switcher. In sub-DFT reliability model of GPS module, two dynamic logic gates FDEP are used to depict the functional dependence relationship between crystal oscillator failure and synchronization failure and between function switcher failure and backup clock mode failure, and a PAND gate is used to depict the events sequence relationship between GPS receiver failure and GPS replacement failure. C. Sub-DFT Reliability Model of CPU Module CPU module consists of hardware and software. Hardware is the carrier of software to accomplish the designed PMU functions such as phasor calculation, frequency estimation, and so

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Fig. 7. Complete DFT reliability model of PMU. Fig. 6. Sub-DFT reliability models of communication module and power source module.

Once the complete DFT reliability model of PMU is constructed, Monte Carlo simulation would be used to determine the reliability indices of PMU accurately. IV. MONTE CARLO ANALYSIS OF RELIABILITY MODEL OF PMU Monte Carlo simulation approach is one of the most effective methods for DFT analysis. Here it is adopted for evaluating the reliability indices of PMU using the DFT reliability model outlined in Section III. It simulates the actual process and random behavior of PMU. The following are the procedures of the proposed MCDFT reliability analysis for PMU. Step 1: According to the probability density functions (PDF) for time to failure and repair of all basic components in PMU, direct sampling method is used to obtain the failure time and repair time of the basic components in PMU as a series of real experiments. Step 2: Based on the logical relationship between the basic components, state-time diagrams of logic gates are used to depict the duration of operation and failure states of the top event. Through the state-time diagrams of various logic gates in the proposed reliability model, the failure time and repair time of PMU can be calculated. Step 3: Calculate the convergence factor to determine whether the Monte Carlo simulation result is close enough to the real value or not. If the convergence factor satises the predened threshold, step 4 will proceed; if not, the simulation result will be stored and the simulation will restart from step 1. Step 4: Calculate the reliability indices of PMU. A. Convergence Assessment Monte Carlo simulation approach is a computer simulation method based on probability theory. In the solution process of the reliability indices of PMU, the convergence of the Monte Carlo simulation results can be used to assess the precision of simulation results. Here, standard error is used to evaluate the convergence. The convergence factor is dened as (2) where (3)

(4) (5) is the failure count of PMU in simulation, is prespecied fraction, is the failure time of PMU in one simulation, is the variance of failure time of PMU, and is the standard error of failure time of PMU. B. Reliability Indices of PMU Reliability indices of PMU are those parameters which can be used to indicate the reliability degree of PMU and analyze the best reliability improvement measures of PMU. In PMU reliability evaluation, the reliability indices mainly include mean time between failures (MTBF), mean time to repair (MTTR), availability, unavailability, and component importance indices including basic cell importance and basic cell module importance. MTBF is the mean working time between two failures for PMU. MTTR is the mean time for the repair of faulted PMU. MTBF and MTTR can be expressed by the method of Monte Carlo simulation approach, respectively:

(6) and are the failure time and repair time of PMU, where respectively, in the Monte Carlo simulation. According to the MTBF and MTTR of PMU, the availability and unavailability of PMU can be described as

(7) Component importance indices are used to arrange the components in order of increasing or decreasing importance. Among all the existing component importance indices, the failure criticality importance index [22], [23] is best suited for the Monte Carlo simulation approach adopted in this paper as no extra Monte Carlo simulation cycle would be needed. In failure criticality importance indices, the basic cell importance of component reects the probability of the failure of PMU

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ZHANG AND CHAN: RELIABILITY EVALUATION OF PHASOR MEASUREMENT UNIT 5

Fig. 8. Flow chart of reliability evaluation of PMU.

arising from the failure of component as

can be dened

(8) where is failure count of PMU caused by the failure of basic component , and is the failure count of component . The basic cell importance of component mainly depends on the logic location of component in the DFT based reliability model of PMU. Another key index in failure criticality importance indices is the basic cell module importance , which reects the proportion of the failure count of PMU arising from the failure of component in all failure counts of PMU. can be expressed as (9)

where is the failure count of PMU. Components with high basic cell module importance would be the components which have high impact on the reliability of PMU. The basic cell module importance of component mainly depends on the failure rate of component . C. Reliability Evaluation Flow Chart of PMU Flow chart of reliability evaluation of PMU using the proposed MCDFT reliability evaluation method is shown in Fig. 8 indicates the count of down state (failure) of PMU where in simulation, indicates the preset convergence criterion of Monte Carlo simulation, indicates the array of failure time of PMU, indicates the array of repair time of PMU. Some equations are included to describe the failure and repair time of PMU and its function modules in Monte Carlo simulation. For example, means that the failure time and repair time of communication module (M6) are evaluated through the Monte Carlo simulation of CSP gate

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TABLE I RELIABILITY PARAMETERS OF BASIC COMPONENTS IN PMU [24], [25]

Fig. 9. Convergence factor

against Monte Carlo simulation count.

TABLE II RELIABILITY INDICES OF PMU AND SEVEN FUNCTION MODULES IN PMU

which is used to construct the sub-DFT reliability model of communication module, means that failure and repair time of GPS module (M4) are determined by those of crystal oscillator. In the start of simulation, parameters , , and are rstly initialized. Secondly, Monte Carlo samples the failure and repair time of each basic component in PMU. Thirdly, failure and repair time of the seven function modules in PMU are evaluated. Fourthly, one set of failure and repair time of PMU are evaluated and stored in array and , then PMU failure count will be incremented and convergence analysis will be conducted using array and to determine whether reliability indices of PMU have reached pre-set accuracy or not. If Monte Carlo simulation result has reached preset accuracy, reliability indices of PMU can be calculated; otherwise, another round of Monte Carlo simulation will be conducted until the convergence criterion is satised. V. NUMERICAL STUDY Table I lists the reliability parameters of the basic components in PMU adopted in this paper. They are either collected or derived from [24], [25]. A. Convergence Assessment Fig. 9 plots the convergence factor against Monte Carlo simulation count. It is clear that the convergence factor remains almost unchanged when the simulation count is over 200 000. The corresponding convergence factor 0.25% was therefore selected as the termination condition for Monte Carlo simulations for ensuring the convergence and accuracy of the reliability indices in evaluating the reliability of PMU in the following studies. B. Reliability Indices of PMU Table II lists the reliability indices evaluated with the proposed MCDFT reliability evaluation method. It can be seen that: 1) Availability of PMU reaches 0.9982, which means PMU is unavailable about 15.8 h/yr.

TABLE III COMPARISON OF RELIABILITY INDICES OF PMU FROM DIFFERENT METHODS

2) Among the seven function modules of PMU, availability of GPS module (M4) and CPU module (M5) have the highest impact on the availability of PMU, and availability of other modules is extremely high due to their redundancy design. Similar PMUs supplied by different manufacturers do have different reliability. The differences are mainly caused by the different reliability parameters of their basic components, especially the basic components in GPS module (M4) and CPU module (M5). Here, two cases with different sets of reliability parameters of basic components in PMU are used to show how different the reliability indices could be in different makes of PMUs. In Case 1, reliability parameters of basic components in PMU are same as listed in Table I. In Case 2, failure rate of components in GPS module (M4) and CPU module (M5) is ve times larger while failure rate of components in other modules remains unchanged. The validity and advantage of proposed MCDFT method are further checked in Table III with a comparison of the reliability indices of PMU for the above two cases acquired with Markov [8] and the proposed MCDFT method. In both Case 1 and 2, there are differences between reliability indices of PMU acquired by the two methods. Those differences are mainly due to the fact that more accurate reliability model of

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ZHANG AND CHAN: RELIABILITY EVALUATION OF PHASOR MEASUREMENT UNIT 7

TABLE IV IMPORTANCE ANALYSIS ON FUNCTION MODULES IN PMU

TABLE V IMPORTANCE ANALYSIS ON BASIC COMPONENTS IN GPS AND CPU MODULES

PMU is constructed and multiple fault patterns rather than only single fault pattern were considered in the proposed MCDFT method. In Case 1, because of the low failure rate of PMU components, there are just only a few multiple fault patterns in all the failure patterns of PMU. The difference between availability of PMU acquired by the two methods is small, , i.e., about 0.8 h/yr for the unavailable time. This concludes that the results obtained with the proposed MCDFT reliability evaluation method is in-line with the benchmarking Markov method for PMU with low failure rate. In Case 2, there are a signicant number of multiple fault patterns in all the failure patterns of PMU because of the high failure rate of PMU components. The difference between availability of PMU acquired by the two methods is expectedly large, , which means the difference between the unavailable time is up to 12.3 h/yr. This indicates that the proposed MCDFT method is superior as it could depict the complex logic relationship between PMU components in more detail and deal with multiple fault patterns. C. Importance Analysis As a complex system, PMU consists of seven function modules which in turn composes of numerous basic components whose reliability degree have different impact on the reliability of PMU. In order to nd out the most critical basic components which would have high impact on the reliability of PMU and its improvement, importance analysis of basic components in PMU should be conducted. Importance analysis is rst conducted on the seven function modules, and then importance analysis is conducted on the basic components in the function modules with high impact on the reliability of PMU. Table IV and Table V summarize the results.

It can be seen from Table IV that the basic cell importance of all function modules is 1 because of the series relationship between PMU and its seven function modules, and GPS (M4) and CPU modules (M5), which possess high basic cell module importance, have high impact on the reliability of PMU. The same conclusion has also been reached from the analysis of Table II. GPS and CPU modules are the two function modules which will be analyzed further on their basic components. Table V summaries the importance analysis conducted on the basic components in the GPS and CPU modules. When GPS receiver fails, GPS module will enter backup clock operation mode and PMU will not fail immediately, so the basic cell importance of GPS receiver is just 42.2057% which is smaller than the basic cell importance of the other basic components in GPS and CPU modules. Due to the high failure rate, GPS receiver has the highest basic cell module importance, which indicates that GPS receiver has the highest impact on the reliability of PMU. Once the basic components which have high impact on PMU reliability have been identied, two measures could be applied to improve the reliability of PMU: 1) Increase the reliability of basic components with high impact on the reliability of PMU. This measure can be achieved through either reducing the failure rate or raising the repair rate of the basic components. 2) Adopt redundancy design of the basic components with high impact on the reliability of PMU. Though both measures can improve the reliability of PMU, their effectiveness and economy are different. D. Sensitivity Analysis The effectiveness and economy of the rst PMU reliability improvement measure mentioned in previous section can be assessed with the help of sensitivity analysis. The changes of availability of PMU with the change of failure rate or repair rate of the basic components in GPS and CPU modules are plotted in Fig. 10. It can be seen that the availability of PMU will increase linearly with the decrease of the failure rate of basic components in GPS and CPU modules. However, the availability of PMU will not reach 1 even if the failure rate decreases to zero which is technically infeasible. Also, the availability of PMU will be saturated when the repair rate is higher than a certain value. E. Redundancy Design Analysis Cold standby components were added to the GPS and CPU modules to test the effectiveness of the second PMU reliability improvement measure. The change of reliability of PMU with the redundancy design of basic components in GPS and CPU modules is shown in Table VI. Availability of PMU does improve signicantly with redundancy added. The biggest improvement would be the redundancy of GPS receiver which has the highest basic cell module importance. Compared with the improvement shown in the sensitivity analysis done in previous section for the rst PMU reliability improvement measure, the second measure with redundancy design on GPS receiver and CPU hardware is more practical and cost effective with larger PMU reliability improvement.

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Fig. 11. Hierarchy of self-adaptive wide-area damping control scheme.

Fig. 11 shows the hierarchy of SAWADC scheme applied on the New England 10-generator test system. Based on the geographical distribution, generators are grouped into three clusters and three phasor data concentrators (PDC) are required to collect all the PMUs data. Ten generator rotor speeds are measured by ten PMUs rst, and then via the corresponding communication link, these speeds are transmitted to the PDCs and the control center where SAWADC scheme is operated. In order to guarantee the availability of this SAWADC scheme, these ten PMUs, thirteen communication links from PMUs to PDC and from PDC to control center, three PDCs, and control center should be available. From the perspective of reliability, these devices are in series and the availability of this damping control schemes can be calculated by the product of their availability [7]. The availability of this SAWADC scheme in IEEE 10-generator test system would be

(10) where and are equal to 1, ten PMUs and thirteen communication links are uniform with [9]. With the PMU availability, , obtained in Case 1 shown in Table III, the availability of this SAWADC scheme, , is 0.9695. VII. CONCLUSION PMU is the core of WAMS which is one of the key system components in smart grid. Due to the large number of PMUs in modern WAMS, reliability of PMU plays an important role in the reliability of WAMS. In this paper, a comprehensive MCDFT reliability evaluation method is proposed to evaluate the reliability of PMU. DFT modeling method is used to construct an accurate reliability model of PMU, in which the complex dynamic relationship between the basic components and PMU can be accurately depicted with multiple fault patterns considered. Monte Carlo simulation approach is used to analyze this DFT reliability model to evaluate various reliability indices including important indices of basic components which are very useful to the reliability improvement of PMU and cannot be easily evaluated by other reliability evaluation methods. In numerical study, comparison of reliability indices of PMU in two cases acquired by two reliability evaluation

Fig. 10. Sensitivity analysis of the basic components in GPS and CPU modules. TABLE VI CHANGE OF RELIABILITY INDICES OF PMU WITH REDUNDANCY DESIGN OF BASIC COMPONENTS IN GPS AND CPU MODULE

VI. APPLICATION OF PMU RELIABILITY IN POWER SYSTEM STABILITY ANALYSIS AND CONTROL Reliability of PMU must be considered in any WAMS based stability analysis and control schemes whose reliability needs to be guaranteed prior to live operation. Here, a self-adaptive widearea damping control (SAWADC) scheme proposed in [26] is taken as an example to demonstrate how the availability of PMU is utilized.

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ZHANG AND CHAN: RELIABILITY EVALUATION OF PHASOR MEASUREMENT UNIT 9

methods shows that the proposed MCDFT reliability evaluation method can produce more accurate reliability indices of PMU due to the more accurate reliability model, especially when the failure rates of PMU components are very high. Importance indices of components in PMU are analyzed to show that GPS receiver and CPU hardware have high impact on the reliability of PMU. Sensitivity and redundancy design analysis are conducted and found that the redundancy design of GPS receiver and CPU hardware would be the better measure for improving the reliability of PMU. A simple example based on a self-adaptive wide-area damping control scheme has also been given to show the application of the proposed PMU reliability evaluation method.

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Ka Wing Chan (M98) received the B.Sc. (Hons) and Ph.D. degrees in electronic and electrical engineering from the University of Bath, Bath, U.K., in 1988 and 1992, respectively. He is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering of the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. His general research interests include power system stability, analysis, control, security and optimization, real-time simulation of power system transients, distributed and parallel processing, and articial intelligence techniques.