Optimal placement of Phasor Measurement Units for transmission grid observability

Phasor Measurement Unit (PMU) provides both magnitude and phase information of current and voltage signals with appropriate time stamp which is very useful in controlling power system networks in real time. Consequently, PMU is considered as one of the most significant measurement devices for complete observability of the future electricity grids. But placing PMU in every bus of the network is not economically viable. This paper aims to place PMUs in different buses of electric network to ensure full network observability employing five evolutionary, colony and swarm optimization algorithms namely backtracking search algorithm (BSA), differential evolution (DE), artificial bee colony (ABC), particle swarm optimization (PSO) and invasive weed optimization (IWO). The proposed algorithms have been tested on IEEE 14-bus, 30-bus, 39-bus and 57-bus test networks. The obtained results illustrate the compatibility of the proposed schemes in compared to each other as well as in compared to available techniques in literatures.