Synchrophasor Big Data Architectures, Platforms and Applications: A Review

The world is moving towards an era of data driven analytics and decision making. Concurrently, the electrical power industry is moving towards a data driven analytical environment from a model driven analytical environment. Electrical power industry utilizes different types of data. Synchrophasor data is one of the main data types associated with many of the power system applications. However, with the expansion of Phasor Measurement Units (PMU) networks, the synchrophasor data is becoming a Big Data (BD) issue. Therefore, many researchers have drawn their attention on synchrophasor big data handling and utilization. This paper briefly discusses power system BD architectures and standard architectures available in real-world applications. The goals of this paper are to make a review of existing BD architectures and commercially available platforms for synchrophasor applications; to do a comparative analysis of existing BD architectures; and to do a review of the existing applications and the compatibility these applications with the existing BD platforms.