Reliability-based probabilistic optimal joint placement of PMUs and flow measurements

• Contingencies are screened by MCS to obtain a more cost-effective solution.
• PMUs and FMs are located at more reliable locations for a more reliable solution.
• Cost of PMUs and FMs are explicitly modeled as the objective function.
• FMs are modeled in OPP using a linear rather than nonlinear constraint.

In this paper, a reliability-based method is proposed for optimal joint placement of Phasor Measurement Units (PMUs) and Flow Measurements (FMs). In order to enhance the reliability of the measurement system, the placement of PMUs and FMs is so done that they are located at more reliable locations. The objective function explicitly encompasses the total cost of PMUs and FMs. In order for a more economical and practical solution, not all PMU failures and branch outages are included in the problem; instead, the most probable contingencies are identified using the Monte Carlo Simulation (MCS) to be included in the problem. Moreover, a new concept is proposed to model PMU failure using secondary PMUs resulting in a reduced cost compared with previous methods. Also, the joint placement of PMUs and FMs is formulated as a linear programming, which is more preferred than existing nonlinear programming from viewpoints of getting the global optimal solution and computation burden. The proposed method is tested on standard test systems and its performance is compared with previous works. The obtained results approve the efficiency of the proposed method.