A unified approach to robust meter placement against loss of measurements and branch outages

This paper presents a systematic procedure by which measurement systems can be optimally upgraded. The proposed procedure yields a measurement configuration that can withstand any single branch outage or loss of single measurement, without losing network observability. It is a numerical method based on the measurement Jacobian and sparse triangular factorization, making its implementation easy in existing state estimators. It can be used off-line in planning and meter placement studies or it can be implemented as part of the on-line observability analysis function. Details of the procedure are presented using numerical examples.