Using Smart Meters in State Estimation of Distribution Networks

The quality of state estimation (SE) in distribution networks has suffered from lack of adequate measurements. Recently, a number of electrical companies have started to install smart meters throughout their distribution networks, which creates an opportunity to achieve high quality SE in distribution networks. However, the signals provided by smart meters are not synchronized, and the time gap between two consecutive measurements of smart meters is considerable, which implies that a snapshot of the entire network is not available. To address this issue, this paper employs an idea that is based on the credibility of each measurement signal. In the proposed methodology, the variance of error of each measured signal is modified to compensate for the non-synchronicity of smart meters. The effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated using IEEE13-bus system. The results show that the introduced method is more reliable than traditional SE techniques and improves the accuracy.