Improving observability using optimal placement of phasor measurement units

•A two stage process built to determine optimal PMU locations for observability.•The measurements will include conventional power flows and injections.•PMUs are placed at the most important network nodes for complete observability.•An adaptive step multidimensional fruit fly algorithm minimizes the number of PMUs.•Scalability of the algorithm is demonstrated using five IEEE standard test systems.

State estimator is crucial for on-line power system monitoring, analysis and control. With the increasing use of synchronized phasor measurement units (PMUs) in power grids, utilization of phasor measurements to improve the precision and observability of state estimator becomes imperative. However, for state estimation, the PMUs should be placed appropriately in the network. In this paper, a novel state estimator for minimizing the size of the PMU configuration while allowing full observability of the network is proposed. The proposed approach initially finds the best configuration of PMUs for observability. Then a novel meta-heuristic algorithm called improved fruit fly optimization method is used to determine the minimum number of phasor measurement units that can sustain observability. This methodology is tested on IEEE 14, 24, 30, 57 and 108 bus systems and the results are compared with those found in literature. Results obtained validate the versatility of the approach to deliver reliable and accurate measurements for the standard test systems under study.