Optimal placement of phasor measurement units with minimum availability of measuring channels in smart power systems

This paper presents a multi-stage method to make the power system complete observability by the optimal placement of phasor measurement units (PMUs) taking into account the availability of PMUs measuring channels. In order to solve the optimization problem, a two stage optimal method is applied. In stage-1, the ant colony optimization (ACO) algorithm is used to find the optimal number and locations of PMUs considering measuring channels and maximize the measurement redundancy (MR) at normal operating condition as well as emergency conditions such as any single line or PMU outage. In Stage-2, the minimum number of PMUs measuring channels using the proposed reduction strategy (RS) with keeping the complete observability is achieved. The proposed method is tested on different standard test systems, namely IEEE 14-bus, 30-bus, 57-bus, 118-bus and New England (NE) 39-bus test systems. To prove the robustness of the developed approach, the results are compared with other recent techniques. The application of the proposed method is employed on a real power system of the west delta network (WDN) as a part of the Unified Egyptian Network (UEN) which is considered as a test system. Simulation results show the capability of the proposed method to find the optimal solution for significant saving in the total cost with more accurate and efficient, especially at increasing of the power system sizing.