One of the primary concerns on the reliability of power systems has been the issue of large-scale fault events and their impacts on the overall stability, reliability, and availabilityof the power grid. As the demand for electric power increases the operation of the electric power gridis pushed to its limits. Under these conditions it has become imperative to operate electric power generation units, including distributed renewable energy resources, in a faultless and uninterrupted manner, to optimize power management and to minimize power losses. Building the future smart power grid, where micro grids and distributed resources are considered as key building blocks,requires developing new control and operation architectures, algorithms, and sensing, decision making, and actuating mechanisms.

In this context, new challenges have been introduced not only to the power system community but also to the signal processing and information communitiesto develop new architectures, control mechanisms, and operation systems. This special session will focus on the application of signal processing algorithms for smart grid power quality monitoring and self-healing.It is intended as a platform for researchers and practitioners topresent the latest advances and developments on theory and application for grid state estimation, grid-event detection and smart sensors.