Optimal placement of voltage measurements for wide area fault location observability considering the uncertainty of network parameters

Abstract

This paper proposes an optimization method based on genetic algorithm (GA) to determine the number and location of phasor measurement units (PMUs) in order to wide area fault location based on voltage measurement. In the practical condition, due to the uncertainty of network parameters including measurement errors and inaccuracy of line parameter values, the estimation of the fault location may be not accurate. Therefore, the proposed method has been developed to determine the number and location of PMUs in order to achieve an acceptable accuracy with required reliability. Since the number and location of PMU depends on the fault location method, a new fault location method has been developed with minimum required number of PMUs. The new method can determine the fault location by measuring from one side of the fault point instead of two sides. Therefore, the number of required PMUs is minimized at comparison to previously presented methods. The weighted least-square (WLS) method is used to solve the fault location problem by minimizing the measurement errors. To consider unsynchronized condition of measurements, the formulation has been modified using only the magnitudes of voltage measurements. Finally, the method has been applied on New England 39-bus test system, and the results show the efficiency of the proposed PMU placement and fault location methods in the network with the uncertainty of parameters.