Synchronized PMU placement incorporating communication infrastructure

Phasor Measurement Unit (PMU) provides the online state estimation and faster monitoring, protection and control of power system. However, PMU installation at every power system buses is an uneconomical decision. Vowing to this, various methodologies have been suggested in past to determine the optimal locations of these devices in order to retain the observability of the system. However, the costs of communication infrastructure from Phasor Data Concentrator (PDC) to PMUs have not been given proper attention. In order to address this issue, the PMU placement problem has been formulated incorporating cost of communication infrastructure also in this paper. The resulting problem has been solved using Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP) method. The results obtained for IEEE 14-bus and IEEE 30-bus systems have been compared with another method in the literature. The test results reveal that the proposed methodology produced the optimal PMU with higher observability and lesser path for establishing communication link compared to an existing method.