Observability Enhancement of Smart Grid Based on Optimal Placement of PMUs

Abstract

This paper presents an efficient observation concerning the enhancement of smart grid (SG) based on the optimal placement of phasor measurement units (OPP) using nonlinear programming (NLP). The proposed algorithm tries to achieve two objectives: (i) to ascertain the minimum number of phasor measurement units (PMUs) and (ii) to increase the redundancy of the SG at all the buses. Synchronized current and voltage phasors are obtained to enhance the accuracy of the state estimation results—a minimum number of PMUs results in a lack of communication facilities at the substation. PMU losses will lead to unobservable buses at the SG. Therefore, PMU losses and communication constraints should be considered during the design process. Limited channel capacity, conventional measurement, and zero-injection bus measurements are also included in the proposed PMU formulation. The proposed algorithm is examined on IEEE~14-, 30-, 57-, 118-, and 300-bus test systems in MATLAB to verify its effectiveness. Furthermore, the results are compared with the simplex linear programming and mixed linear programming methods to prove the efficacy of the presented algorithm. The output thus obtained reveals that the NLP algorithm obtains approximately the same PMUs as other methods.