Optimal placement of Phasor Measurement Units using Particle swarm Optimization

This paper solves the Phasor Measurement Unit (PMU) placement problem by Particle swarm Optimization (PSO). The PSO algorithm is implemented on three bus systems namely the 7, 14, 57 IEEE standard Bus systems. In this paper it has been proved that the placing of Phasor measurement units only at buses with the highest number of incident branches surely doesn´t yield the optimal placement of the PMUs. This encouraged the idea of random placement of PMUs in the system and selection of the specific arrangement of PMUs which accomplished the task of complete observability of the system with minimum number of PMUs thus optimizing the PMU placement problem. The performance is compared with that of Adaptive GA, CLONALG and Adaptive CLONALG. The proposed method was found better.