Accurate online classification of disturbance events in a transmission network is an important part of wide-area monitoring. Although many conventional machine learning techniques are very successful in classifying events, they rely on extracting inf
ormation from PMU data at control centers and processing them through CPU/GPUs, which are highly inefficient in terms of energy consumption. To solve this challenge without compromising accuracy, this paper presents a novel methodology based on event-driven neuromorphic computing architecture for classification of power system disturbances. A Spiking Neural Network (SNN)-based computing framework is proposed, which exploits sparsity in disturbances and promotes local event driven operation for unsupervised learning and inference from incoming data. Spatio-temporal information of PMU signals is first extracted and encoded into spike trains and classification is achieved with SNN-based supervised and unsupervised learning framework. Moreover, a QR decomposition-based selection technique is proposed to identify signals participating in the low rank subspace of multiple disturbance events. Performance of the proposed method is validated on data collected from a 16-machine, 5-area New England-New York system.
