Ali Abur

About

Ali Abur is a University Distinguished Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Northeastern University. He obtained his B.S. degree from Orta Dogu Teknik Universitesi in Ankara, Turkey, and his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from The Ohio State University. He was a Professor at Texas A&M University until November 2005, when he joined Northeastern University as a Professor and Chair of the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department. His research and educational activities focus on power systems, particularly monitoring the power grid operating state during normal and faulted conditions, and modeling and estimation of power system operating conditions to improve reliability and efficiency. Abur has made significant contributions to power system state estimation and power engineering education, and he is recognized as a Fellow of the IEEE and a member of the National Academy of Engineering. Throughout his career, he has received numerous honors including the IEEE Power & Energy Society Outstanding Power Engineering Educator Award in 2014, the IEEE PES Charles Concordia Power Systems Engineering Award in 2025, and election to the National Academy of Engineering in 2023. He has held leadership positions such as Department Chair at Northeastern University and is involved in research projects related to resilient electric energy transmission networks and renewable energy integration.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Engineering
• Electrical engineering
• Control engineering
• Reliability engineering
• Distributed computing
• Algorithm
• Telecommunications
• Electronic engineering
• Mathematics

Selected publications

• Roles of Dynamic State Estimation in Power System Modeling, Monitoring and Operation

  IEEE Transactions on Power Systems · 2020 · 220 citations

  Power system dynamic state estimation (DSE) remains an active research area. This is driven by the absence of accurate models, the increasing availability of fast-sampled, time-synchronized measurements, and the advances in the capability, scalability, and affordability of computing and communications. This paper discusses the advantages of DSE as compared to static state estimation, and the implementation differences between the two, including the measurement configuration, modeling framework a…

  DOI

• A Survey of Power System State Estimation Using Multiple Data Sources: PMUs, SCADA, AMI, and Beyond

  IEEE Transactions on Smart Grid · 2023-06-15 · 137 citations

  articleOpen access

  State estimation (SE) is indispensable for the situa-tional awareness of power systems. Conventional SE is fed by measurements collected from the supervisory control and data ac-quisition (SCADA) system. In recent years, available data sources have been greatly enriched with the deployment of phasor meas-urement units (PMUs), advanced metering infrastructure (AMI), intelligent electronic devices (IEDs), etc. The integration of multi-ple data sources provides unprecedented opportunities for en-ha…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Fault Location in Active Distribution Networks Containing Distributed Energy Resources (DERs)

  IEEE Transactions on Power Delivery · 2020 · 51 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding

  This paper presents a simple yet effective method for locating faults in radial distribution networks where impedance-based methods are known to have limitations, especially in the presence of inverter-based power sources (IBPS). The proposed approach utilizes the Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) to capture the first arrival times of the fault-generated traveling waves. It is assumed that a digital fault recorder (DFR) exists at the terminal node of every lateral, as well as the beginning and en…

  DOI

• Formulation of Three-Phase State Estimation Problem Using a Virtual Reference

  IEEE Transactions on Power Systems · 2020 · 46 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding

  State Estimation (SE) is the backbone of modern Energy Management System (EMS) due its capability of processing real time measurements and provide reliable information to system operators. Since its introduction to power systems in the 70's, SE has been widely used in transmission networks. Distribution grids on the other hand lack sufficient number of real time measurements, and for that reason SE has not been widely implemented on these systems. The recent increase in the number of renewable e…

  DOI

• Fault Location in Power Networks Using a Sparse Set of Digital Fault Recorders

  IEEE Transactions on Smart Grid · 2022-04-20 · 32 citations

  articleSenior author

  This paper presents a robust fault location method that can be used for radial or meshed power systems. It addresses several challenges encountered in previous work such as signal attenuation by power transformers, measurement errors, the impact of Inverter Based Power Sources (IBPSs), differentiating faults from other events. This is accomplished via a KMeans clustering of DFRs and using a weighted directed tree model enabling accurate fault location. The proposed algorithm is tested on both tr…

  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• Customized Wavelets for Analysis of Fault Transients in Power Systems

  NSF · $336k · 2008–2012

• New Methods of Fault Simulation and Location for Smart Grids Based on Synchronized Measurements

  NSF · $400k · 2012–2016

• A Comprehensive Approach to Monitoring Active Distribution Systems

  NSF · $379k · 2021–2025

Frequent coauthors

• Yuzhang Lin

  New York University

  22 shared

• Antonio Gómez‐Expósito

  18 shared

• Murat Göl

  Middle East Technical University

  17 shared

• Mladen Kezunović

  15 shared

• Mert Korkali

  University of Missouri

  13 shared

• Fernando Magnago

  13 shared

• A. Keyhani

  12 shared

• Alireza Rouhani

  Dominion (United States)

  11 shared

Awards & honors

• IEEE Power & Energy Society Outstanding Power Engineering Ed…
• IEEE PES Boston Chapter Outstanding Engineering Award (2014)
• Elected Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic…
• National Science Foundation, Research Initiation Award (1989…
• IEEE Power and Energy Society (PES) Charles Concordia Power…

Similar researchers at Northeastern University

• Gregory D. Abowdh-82
• Ruth Aguilerah-77
• Rajesh Aggarwalh-31