Optimal PMU placement method for complete topological and numerical observability of power system

This paper presents a new method of optimal PMU placement (OPP) for complete power system observability. A two-stage PMU placement method is proposed, where stage-1 finds out the minimum number of PMUs required to make the power system topologically observable and stage-2 is proposed to check if the resulted PMU placement (from stage-1) leads to a full ranked measurement Jacobian. In case the PMUs placed, ensuring topological observability in stage-1, do not lead to the Jacobian of full rank, a sequential elimination algorithm (SEA) is proposed in stage-2 to find the optimal locations of additional PMUs, required to be placed to make the system numerically observable as well. The proposed method is tested on three systems and the results are compared with three other topological observability based PMU placement methods. The simulation results ensure the complete system observability and also demonstrate the need of using stage-2 analysis along with the topological observability based PMU placement methods. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.