Heuristic Method for Optimal Placement of Phasor Measurement Units (PMUs)

Abstract

The phasor measurement units (PMUs) are very important tool for monitoring and control the power system. PMUs give real time, synchronized measurements of voltages at the buses and also current phasors which are incident to those buses where these PMUs are located. It is unnecessary and impossible to place PMU at each bus to estimate the states because high cost of PMUs and also the cost of communication facilities. It is necessary to find out the minimum number of PMUs to entire power system observable. The optimal placement of PMUs (OPP) problem solved by various techniques such as mathematical programming, metaheuristic techniques. The recently some heuristic optimization technique proposed to determine the minimum number of PMUs for various systems should be completely observable. This optimal PMUs placement (OPP) problem is pure binary optimization problem. A topological observability based three stages optimal PMU placement technique is proposed for solving this problem. For topological observability a set of minimum PMUs is required to make the system completely observable. It is assumed that there are strategic buses in every system using that the PMU placement becomes an easy task. The proposed method tested on standard IEEE bus systems and compared the results of the proposed method to the previously methods.