Optimal PMU placement for pessimistic dynamic vulnerability assessment

Abstract

This study proposes a novel optimal phasor measurement unit (PMU) placement method for dynamic vulnerability assessment with minimum number of PMUs. PMU measurements should reflect the change of power system status as earlier as possible when a contingency occurs. Therefore, those buses which are sensitive to the change of power system status have to be equipped with PMUs to monitor the fragile areas of power systems. First, a large power system is partitioned into several coherent clusters. Next, a probabilistic vulnerability index defined as the objective function and a binary quadratic programming model are proposed for this purpose. Finally, the proposed method is tested on IEEE 9-, 39-, and 145-bus systems. Results show that this method results in a PMU configuration with minimum number of devices and high vulnerability index. Such a PMU placement is able to estimate the vulnerability of power systems.