Electrical power systems are continuously upgrading into networks with a higher degree of automation capable of identifying and reacting to different events that may trigger undesirable situations. In power systems with decreasing inertia and damping levels, poorly damped oscillations with sustained or growing amplitudes following a disturbance may eventually lead to instability and provoke a major event such as a blackout. Additionally, with the increasing and considerable share of renewable power generation, unprecedented operational challenges shall be considered when proposing protection schemes against unstable electro-mechanical (e.g. ringdown) oscillations. In an emergency situation, islanding operations enable splitting a power network into separate smaller networks to prevent a total blackout. Due to such changes, identifying the underlying types of oscillatory coherency and the islanding protocols are necessary for a continuously updating process to be incorporated into the existing power system monitoring and control tasks. This paper examines the existing evaluation methods and the islanding protocols as well as proposes an updated operational guideline based on the latest data-analytic technologies.

Nowadays, transmission system operators require higher degree of observability in real-time to gain situational awareness and improve the decision-making process to guarantee a safe and reliable operation. Digitalization of energy systems allows utilities to monitor the system dynamic performance in real-time at fast time scales. The use of such technologies has unlocked new opportunities to introduce new data driven algorithms for improving the stability assessment and control of the system. Motivated by these challenges, a group of experts have worked together to highlight and establish a baseline set of these common concerns, which can be used as motivation to propose innovative analytics and data-driven solutions. In this document, the results of a survey on 10 transmission system operators around the world are presented and it aims to understand the current practices of the participating companies, in terms of data acquisition, handling, storage, modelling and analytics. The overall objective of this document is to capture the actual needs from the interviewed utilities, thereby laying the groundwork for setting valid assumptions for the development of advanced algorithms in this field.