Complete solution of optimal PMU placement using reduced exhaustive search

Optimal Phasor Measurement Unit placement (OPP) is an important problem which attempts to And the minimum number of PMUs thereby minimizing cost that will achieve complete system observability. Prominent OPP deterministic algorithms such as integer linear programming (ILP) and exhaustive search (ES) both takes a long time to And the complete set of solutions. This paper presents an optimized version of exhaustive search (ES) algorithm for OPP. The proposed algorithm reduces the search space and the number of computations compared to the traditional ES thus it is named as reduced exhaustive search (RES). Unlike most other OPP methods, ES and RES are capable of enumerating all the possible solutions. Various conditions such as the existence of zero injection buses (ZIB) and n-number of PMU outage are also considered. The aforementioned algorithms are implemented and tested on 9, 14, 24, 30 and 39-bus IEEE test systems using MATLAB. Finally, the results show that the proposed algorithm performed better than ILP and ES in finding all the possible solutions for OPP.