Optimal phasor measurement unit placement for power system observability — A heuristic approach

In this paper a heuristics based method is proposed for optimal phasor measurement unit (PMU) placement in a power system. The objective is to determine the strategic locations for PMUs so that the power system is made completely observable with minimum number of PMUs. Zero injection buses are considered as virtual measurements in the proposed method. The optimal phasor measurement unit placement problem (OPPP) is solved using simple heuristics and network connectivity information. Simulation results for IEEE 14-bus, 24-bus, 30-bus, 57-bus, 118-bus and New England 39bus test system are presented and compared with the existing techniques. The results show that the proposed method is simple to implement and compares well with the other existing methods.