PMU Placement With Channel Limitation for Faulty Line Detection in Transmission Systems

Abstract

This paper presents a new phasor measurement unit (PMU) placement methodology to provide the required data for wide-area backup protection scheme. The presented placement method is primarily a binary linear optimization problem whose constraints are defined to detect faults on transmission lines based on the difference between voltage values of a bus obtained from two different paths, while the full observability of the system is also guaranteed. To consider the limitation on the number of PMU channels, a new bi-level approach is also proposed in this paper, in which the upper level is aimed to find the best solution among different submatrices, while the lower level finds the best PMU placement solution for each submatrix. Therefore, the contribution of this paper is to propose a methodology to optimally locate minimum number of PMUs in a power system in a way that while full observability of the system and its wide-area backup protection are assured, the types of each PMU—in terms of its number of channels as well as the lines whose currents should be measured by the PMU to satisfy the constraints—are determined. The performance of the proposed methodology is evaluated on standard test power systems.