Finding strategic locations for phasor measurement units by heuristic methods

State estimation (SE) provides the most likely estimate of the system operating state, for a given network configuration. It processes the available data commonly obtained at the substations equipped with remote measurement units. Centralized single-scan weighted least squares (WLS) estimation has become a well-established application program of energy management systems. Regardless, SE can still be considered as a function under construction. Many issues involving marked improvements in the estimation process are in the research agenda of the field. Among them, the use of all data available for processing has been pointed out recurrently. Having this in mind, phasor measurements have been indicated as an important complement of the conventional SCADA measurements, in view of enhancing data debugging. Adopting a phasor-aided state estimation (PHASE) approach, this paper proposes a heuristic method of strategically placing PMUs, in view of enhancing SE capability to deal with gross measurement errors (bad data). Simulation results obtained on IEEE benchmark systems with different topologies are presented and discussed.