अमूर्त

Optimal Placement of PMU for Power System Observability

Parth Patel, Jigar Tailor, Chinmay Naik

Phasor Measurement Unit (PMU) is a relatively new technology that, when employed in power networks, offers real-time synchronised measurements of the voltages at buses and currents along the lines that connect them. This is accomplished by using a GPS based monitoring system which facilitates time synchronisation of measurements and unlike SCADA, makes the measured data available in Real-Time format. SCADA is not able to provide Real-time data due to the low speeds at which RTUs (Remote Terminal Units) provide data. Availability of time-stamped phasor measurements makes PMUs preferable for power system monitoring and control applications such as State Estimation, Instability Prediction Analysis, Real time monitoring of the system conditions, Islanding Detection, System Restoration and Bad Data Detection. Since PMUs are expensive, their procurement and installation needs to be planned both in terms of economy and utility. Usually utilities like to see that the power network becomes fully observable with minimum number of PMUs placed at strategic buses. Where full observability refers to all the buses in the network are actively monitored. Thus the problem of optimal placement of PMUs is formulated as an optimization problem where the number of PMUs is minimized subject to complete system observability. This paper solves the optimal placement of PMUs for power system observability using Integer Linear Programming (ILP) methodology. The method is tested on IEEE 14 Bus System.