Optimization of Phasor Measurement Unit Placement Using Several Proposed Case Factors for Power Network Monitoring

Recent developments in electrical power systems are concerned not only with static power flow control but also with their control during dynamic processes. Smart Grids came into being when it was noticed that the traditional electrical power system structure was lacking in reliability, power flow control, and consistency in the monitoring of phasor quantities. The Phasor Measurement Unit (PMU) is one of the main critical factors for Smart Grid (SG) operation. It has the ability to provide real-time synchronized measurement of phasor quantities with the help of a Global Positioning System (GPS). However, when considering the installation costs of a PMU device, it is far too expensive to equip on every busbar in all grid stations. Therefore, this paper proposes a new approach for the Optimum Placement of the PMU problem (OPP problem) to minimize the installed number of PMUs and maximize the measurement redundancy of the network. Exclusion of the unwanted nodes technique is used in the proposed approach, in which only the most desirable buses consisting of generator bus and load bus are selected, without considering Pure Transit Nodes (PTNs) in the optimum PMU placement sets. The focal point of the proposed work considers, most importantly, the case factor of the exclusion technique of PTNs from the optimum PMU locations, as prior approaches concerning almost every algorithm have taken PTNs as their optimal PMU placement sets. Furthermore, other case factors of the proposed approach, namely, PMU channel limits, radial bus, and single PMU outage, are also considered for the OPP problem. The proposed work is tested on standard Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineering (IEEE)-case studies from MATPOWER on the MATLAB software. To show the success of the proposed work, the outputs are compared with the existing techniques.