A new strategy for optimal PMU placement based on limited exhaustive approach

This paper presents a new strategy for optimal PMU placement with an objective of observing the whole monitored system with minimum PMUs. An optimization tool, named as limited exhaustive approach (LEA), is proposed. The proposed LEA retains the inherent characteristic, being of high reliability, of exhaustive approach, and in the meanwhile has a searching space much smaller than exhaustive. An approximately optimal PMU placement (AOPP) is established in order to identify the searching space of LEA. The AOPP is a kind of PMU configurations, which can completely observe the whole monitored system, but probably needs to utilize a few more PMUs than the optimal PMU placement (OPP). Moreover the AOPP is deterministically obtained by detailed power system state observability analyses. Then the concept of bus neighbor (BN) is defined, and it will help to derive the searching space of LEA from the determined AOPP. Finally the proposed strategy for optimal PMU placement is successively tested on the IEEE 14-bus system and IEEE 39-bus system, and the simulation results confirm the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed strategy.