Optimal PMU placement in a smart grid: An updated review

Abstract

In recent years, the monitoring and control of the power grid has become an essential objective to prevent system failure. The provision of measurements generated from phasor measurement units (PMUs) can play a significant role in achieving this goal. PMUs can offer synchronized measurements and dynamically measure voltages and current phasors. The estimation of the states of each bus via the installation of PMUs at each node of the bus is not necessary and is hindered by the high cost and complexity of the installation and communication methods. Therefore, a method that reduces the total number of PMUs without affecting the maximum observability and reliability of the power grid is needed. Achieving the minimum number of installed PMUs with maximum observability is the main target of optimal PMU placement. Several techniques are available for resolving this issue, and these techniques lie in two main categories: mathematical techniques and metaheuristic approaches. In the last few years, a huge number of publications have reported different techniques that are based on the principle used and the intended application. Some comprehensive reviews have also been reported a few years ago. This area is an intensively pursued field of study, and many new techniques and important results have been reported after the publication of these reviews. Therefore, there is a need for a comprehensive review of recent research on optimal PMU placement. The present work attempts to provide a critical review of recent literature on optimal PMU placement. We expect this review to be beneficial to researchers and industries that are studying the optimal placement of PMUs in their networks.

Strategic PMU placement to alleviate power system vulnerability against cyber attacks

“…An additional deployment of PMUs on around 30-40% of the nodes, which are optimally obtained through the proposed approach, will further reduce the cyber vulnerability while improving the observability to level 2, thus increasing the total percentage of PMU buses in the network to 70-80%. These result presented in Table 1 for achieving a specific observability level with each deployment phase are consistent with other existing works [11,15,[18][19][20][21][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32]. Hence, one can observe the accuracy of the proposed approach for reducing the power system's cyber vulnerability, with the least possible PMUs in multiple stages.…”

A Critical Review of State-of-the-Art Optimal PMU Placement Techniques

“…Mohanta et al [8] systematically reviewed PMUs as sensors and briefly explained formulation and techniques used in OPP. Sefid et al [2] reviewed OPP in the smart grid but discussed very few published articles related only to OPP. Misclassification of metaheuristic techniques presented is correctly presented in our paper.…”

“…Conventionally, power system quantities like voltage and current are monitored through supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems. The SCADA system is not sufficient for monitoring the modern power system [2][3][4] because of its low resolution, and it is not capable of giving phasor, frequency, and rate of change of frequency information. A report concerning the 14 August 2003 cascading blackout incident in the northeastern United States, published by the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC), showcased that the phase angle between western Michigan and Cleveland did increase steadily for an hour, as shown in Figure 1.…”

A Bounded Exhaustive Search Technique for Optimal Phasor Measurement Unit Placement in Power Grids

“…, [5,2] and [5,3,1] can be avoided as they are duplication or symmetrical to the combinations of [1,3,4], [1,3,5] and [2,5].…”

“…In other words, it is not necessary to install PMUs at all buses, and therefore, the number of PMU installations can be reduced. This issue attracted many researchers to come up with a new method for determining the optimal placements of PMUs in power grids in previous decades [5].…”