A Practical Model for Optimal PMU Placement

In this paper, a practical model for the problem of Optimal PMU Placement (OPP) is proposed. Most of the well-studied OPP models have been developed based on the standard small test systems with minimum focus on the practical points of view and implementation challenges. Therefore, the practical points of view such as phased installation of PMUs based on voltage levels, buses preconditioning, PMUs outage contingencies, etc., are considered in this paper to modify the problem objective function and constraints and improve the model. A practical implementation for this model is also proposed in the paper. The proposed model and implementation are tested in multiple small- and large-scale test systems such as IEEE 14-, 30-, 57-, 118-, and 300-bus test systems as well as WECC 240-bus test system. Five test cases are designed to reflect different practical conditions in the OPP problem. Results of different case studies on different test systems confirm that the proposed model and implementation not only cover the practical scenarios, but also improve the performance in terms of minimizing the number of PMUs in some scenarios for large-scale systems.