Trade-Offs in PMU Deployment for State Estimation in Active Distribution Grids

Monitoring systems are expected to play a major role in active distribution grids, and the design of the measurement infrastructure is a critical element for an effective operation. The use of any available and newly installed, though heterogeneous, metering device providing more accurate and real-time measurement data offers a new paradigm for the distribution grid monitoring system. In this paper the authors study the meter placement problem for the measurement infrastructure of an active distribution network, where heterogeneous measurements provided by Phasor Measurement Units (PMUs) and other advanced measurement systems such as Smart Metering systems are used in addition to measurements that are typical of distribution networks, in particular substation measurements and a-priori knowledge. This work aims at defining a design approach for finding the optimal measurement infrastructure for an active distribution grid. The design problem is posed in terms of a stochastic optimization with the goal of bounding the overall uncertainty of the state estimation using heterogeneous measurements while minimizing the investment cost. The proposed method is also designed for computational efficiency so to cover a wide set of scenarios.