Impact of distribution system reconfiguration on optimal placement of phasor measurement units

Abstract

Phasor measurement units (PMUs) become a necessity in the modern distribution system especially with the direction towards smart grid. The PMUs should be placed appropriately in the distribution network. The problem of optimal PMU placement for full observability is analyzed in literature. Distribution network reconfiguration for loss reduction is also analyzed in literature. This paper studies the placement problem of PMUs in distribution system considering the system reconfiguration. System reconfiguration is achieved using the ant colony optimization (ACO) algorithm to solve the minimum losses problem. Greedy algorithm is used as an optimization tool to obtain the minimal number of PMUs and their corresponding locations. The 33-node distribution system is tested for optimally locating the PMUs with different network reconfiguration.