Abstract
This letter develops a fast analytical method for uncertainty quantification of electromechanical oscillation frequency due to varying generator dampings. By employing the techniques of matrix determinant reduction, two types of uncertainty analysis are investigated to quantify the impact of the generator damping on electromechanical oscillation frequency, i.e., interval analysis and probabilistic analysis. The proposed analytical frequency estimation formula is verified against conventional methods on two transmission system models. Then, Monte Carlo experiments and interval analysis are respectively conducted to verify the established lower/upper bound formulae and probability distribution formulae. Results demonstrate the accuracy and speed of the proposed method.
POWER system low-frequency oscillation, also known as electromechanical oscillation, is a common issue in large-scale transmission power systems. Fast identification of the electromechanical oscillation mode (in short, “mode”) is an important step in system online monitoring. The oscillation frequency of each mode is typically distinct from each other in a stable power system [
The generator damping coefficient is a critical parameter. It can represent the aggregated damping effects of the frequency-dependent load [
Existing methods for power system related UQ include Gram-Charlier series [
1) Faster calculation speed due to the usage of analytical formulae. Thus, it can assist system operators in quickly identifying abnormal oscillation modes from the oscillation frequency results obtained by field measurements.
2) No need for (post-disturbance) time-series of voltage or frequency signals. Thus, it is less affected by measurement noise or data package loss.
Note that the proposed method does not aim to replace other measurement-based or probabilistic small-signal analysis methods but to provide a theoretical baseline for system operators in a quicker manner.
The rest of this letter is organized as follows. In Section II, this letter derives a concise analytical estimation formula for oscillation frequencies by transforming the original standard eigenvalue problem (SEP) into a quadratic eigenvalue problem (QEP) [
An n-generator power system can be reduced to a network with only generator buses [

Fig. 1 Reduced network topology for an n-generator power system.
The electromechanical oscillation frequencies are mainly associated with the generator swing equations [
(1) |
where , , , , , and () are the rotor angle, speed, electromagnetic power, internal voltage, inertia, and damping coefficients of the generator, respectively; is the synchronous frequency, e.g., 60 Hz; I is the identity matrix; is the element of the reduced nodal admittance matrix; is the steady-state rotor angle difference between the
The characteristic equation of the above system matrix is:
(2) |
In (2), the first equality holds since holds for any square matrix X. Then, Theorem 3 from [
Theorem: the identity holds for a 2-by-2 block matrix , if .
It is clear that the above theorem condition holds for the bottom two block matrices of (2). Thus, it leads to:
(3) |
In the above derivation, the property is used again, and since M and D are both diagonal.
Apply eigen-decomposition for the third matrix term in (3), i.e., , and denote . Then, (3) can be approximated by:
(4) |
Note that holds by the Laplace expansion theorem. Thus, (4) becomes:
(5) |
The final determinant in (5) leads to:
(6) |
Denote the system eigenvalues, i.e., oscillation modes, as , where represents a pair of complex roots [
(7) |
It can be verified that when all Di are zeros, (7) will degenerate to an exact conclusion in Chapter 8 of [
In the UQ theory [
Note that, by (7), the proposed UQ method can also be adapted to study the uncertainty impacts of the system operating condition and generator inertia , which is out of scope of this letter.
In (7), the condition (it can be verified that is real and nonnegative due to the near symmetricity of J and the positive diagonality of M) needs to be held to keep the argument of the square root positive; otherwise, is not an oscillation mode. Supposing (in this letter, generator damping is considered nonnegative), the first- and second-order derivatives of to are:
(8) |
Thus, based on the signs of and the knowledge of calculus, the interval of fi can be obtained as:
(9) |
In (7), common distributions can be considered when treating Di as random. For example, if it satisfies a normal distribution, i.e., , the cumulative distribution function (CDF) of can be derived as (10) based on (7).
(10) |
where ; and is the CDF of the Gaussian distribution N(0,1) (the standard normal distribution), which is readily available in most numerical computation software.
The expected value and variance of can be computed by the following expressions based on the “delta method” in statistics theory [
(11) |
(12) |
where , , and follow (7) and (8); and and are the expectation and variance operators, e.g., and when , respectively. Note that the above derivation process can be generalized to other common distributions based on (7).
This section tests the proposed method on a modified IEEE 9-bus system [

Fig. 2 IEEE 9-bus system topology.
Comparison results for the base case scenario S0, scenario-1 (load decreased by 5%, denoted as S1), scenario-2 (load increased by 5%, denoted as S2), scenario-3 (load decreased by 10%, denoted as S3), and scenario-4 (load increased by 10%, denoted as S4) are listed in
Method | Scenario | f (Hz) | Time (ms) | |
---|---|---|---|---|
Mode 1 | Mode 2 | |||
QEP | S0 | 1.3825 | 2.1259 | 0.305 |
S1 | 1.3803 | 2.1248 | 0.271 | |
S2 | 1.3843 | 2.1271 | 0.245 | |
S3 | 1.3779 | 2.1237 | 0.281 | |
S4 | 1.3858 | 2.1283 | 0.265 | |
SEP | S0 | 1.3825 | 2.1259 | 1.603 |
S1 | 1.3803 | 2.1248 | 1.373 | |
S2 | 1.3843 | 2.1271 | 1.117 | |
S3 | 1.3779 | 2.1237 | 1.142 | |
S4 | 1.3858 | 2.1283 | 1.215 | |
FULL | S0 | 1.4006 | 2.1261 | 35.018 |
S1 | 1.3987 | 2.1254 | 31.931 | |
S2 | 1.4021 | 2.1268 | 33.047 | |
S3 | 1.3958 | 2.1242 | 31.588 | |
S4 | 1.4025 | 2.1287 | 32.797 |
As observed, frequencies of all the oscillation modes obtained by the proposed method can match those by the SEP method and the FULL method in all three scenarios. The time cost of FULL method (already excluding the data reading time) is higher than the reduced network based the methods (QEP, SEP), but their frequency results are still close.
Here, take the 2.1 Hz mode as an illustrative example. The dominant generator associated with that mode is the one at bus-3 based on (7). The base case D value of that generator is 3.01 p.u.. For the experiment of interval analysis, a set of 50 D values is drawn from an example interval [0, 6.02] for that generator. Then by (9), the lower and upper bounds for that mode can be analytically obtained as shown in
Mode No. | f-LB (analytical)(Hz) | f-UB (analytical)(Hz) | fmin (sampled) (Hz) | fmax (sampled) (Hz) |
---|---|---|---|---|
1 | - | - | 1.3824 | 1.3826 |
2 | 2.1248 | 2.1263 | 2.1249 | 2.1261 |
It can be observed that the sampled minimum and maximum values of that 2.1 Hz mode are within the analytically derived bounds, and the frequency of another oscillation mode is relatively less affected. The scatter plot is shown in

Fig. 3 UQ for 2.1 Hz mode in IEEE 9-bus system. (a) Interval analysis. (b) Probabilistic analysis.
Monte Carlo simulation setting: another set of 1000 values of D for the generator at bus-3 are sampled from an example normal distribution . Then, eigenvalues are computed by the SEP method. Two CDF curves are shown in
The expected value by (11) and the standard deviation by (12) (as the square root) are listed in
Method | Expected value | Standard deviation | Time cost (ms) |
---|---|---|---|
Monte Carlo | 2.1259 | 64.7 | |
Analytical (proposed) | 2.1259 | 1.1 |
To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method on complicated large power systems, a modified WECC system with 179 buses and 29 generators [

Fig. 4 Topology of WECC 179-bus system.
The results of two example modes are inspected here, of which one is a local mode with 1.71 Hz frequency (base case), and the other is an inter-area mode with 0.77 Hz frequency (base case). The meanings of the five scenarios (S0-S4) are the same as that described in Section IV. It can be observed in
Method | Scenario | f (Hz) | Time (ms) | ||
---|---|---|---|---|---|
Mode 1 | Mode 2 | ||||
QEP | S0 | 1.7130 | 0.7740 | 0.997 | |
S1 | 1.7222 | 0.7798 | 1.031 | ||
S2 | 1.7058 | 0.7748 | 1.065 | ||
S3 | 1.7101 | 0.6929 | 1.059 | ||
S4 | 1.7018 | 0.7534 | 0.988 | ||
SEP | S0 | 1.7129 | 0.7736 | 8.964 | |
S1 | 1.7221 | 0.7794 | 8.190 | ||
S2 | 1.7057 | 0.7735 | 7.981 | ||
S3 | 1.7100 | 0.6939 | 8.120 | ||
S4 | 1.7017 | 0.7529 | 8.062 | ||
FULL | S0 | 1.7139 | 0.7745 | 70.727 | |
S1 | 1.7181 | 0.7645 | 77.685 | ||
S2 | 1.7056 | 0.7726 | 75.374 | ||
S3 | 1.7199 | 0.7092 | 70.332 |
Here, take the 1.71 Hz mode as an illustrative example. The dominant generator associated with that mode is the one at bus-6 based on (7). The value of base case D of that generator is 4.0 p.u.. A set of 50 D values are drawn from an example interval [0, 8.0] for that generator. Then by (9), the lower and upper bounds for that mode are presented in
Mode No. | f-LB (analytical) (Hz) | f-UB (analytical) (Hz) | (sampled) (Hz) | (sampled) (Hz) |
---|---|---|---|---|
1 | 1.7097 | 1.714 | 1.7103 | 1.7133 |
2 | - | - | 0.7735 | 0.7737 |

Fig. 5 UQ for 1.71 Hz mode in WECC 179-bus system. (a) Interval analysis. (b) Probabilistic analysis.
Monte Carlo simulation setting: another set of 1000 values of D for the generator at bus-5 are sampled from an example normal distribution . Then eigenvalues are computed by the SEP method. Two CDF curves are shown in
Again, the CDF curve by the analytically derived distribution in (10) can follow the trend of the CDF curve by the Monte Carlo simulation, and their statistics are close to each other, as shown in
Method name | Expected value | Standard deviation | Time cost (ms) |
---|---|---|---|
Monte Carlo | 1.71186 | 0.00149 | 1346.8 |
Analytical (proposed) | 1.71187 | 0.00138 | 1.8 |
An analytical UQ method for electromechanical oscillation frequencies is established regarding the impact of varying generator damping. When the uncertain intervals of the generator damping parameters are given, the uncertain intervals of the electromechanical oscillation frequencies can be analytically obtained. When typical probabilistic distributions, e.g., the normal distributions, of the generator damping coefficients are given, the analytical expressions of probabilistic distributions and statistics for the electromechanical oscillation frequencies can also be obtained. The accuracy and speed of the proposed method are demonstrated via comparison experiments. The next step is to combine the proposed analytical method with other numerical methods, e.g., AESOPS [
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