No abstract

Summary Wide area monitoring system has been implemented in power systems to improve control and protection aspects by carrying out the continuous synchronous measurement. It consists of phasor measurement units (PMUs) along with communication infrastructure (CI) to connect all PMUs to the phasor data concentrator (PDC). In this work, simultaneous optimization of PMU count thereby its cost and CI cost has been taken as the objective while ensuring entire system observability. To incorporate the effect of zero injection bus, an improved model has been adopted. A modified objective function has been proposed which enhances maximum observability and further improves the reliability of system monitoring. Dijkstra's algorithm has been utilized for designing optimal CI as well as to identify the location of PDC. Practical operating scenarios such as N‐1 contingency and the presence of pre‐installed PMU or fiber optic have also been simulated. Binary dragonfly algorithm has been applied to solve the considered optimization problem. To demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed method it has been implemented on different IEEE standard test cases. A comparison of obtained results has been presented which indicates the superiority of the proposed method over other methods reported in the literature.