Optimal PMU placement for wide-area monitoring using chemical reaction optimization

The problem of optimal placement of phasor measurement units (PMUs) was first studied using graph theoretic and mathematical programming methods. However, due to the increase of renewable generations, PMUs may be required not only in transmission networks, but also in sub-transmission, or even distribution networks. Hence, the size of this PMU placement problem will become too big for mathematical programming approaches. As a result, in this paper, we investigated solving this problem using a novel metaheuristic technique, called chemical reaction optimization (CRO). CRO loosely mimics the interactions between molecules in a chemical reaction process. Based on the canonical CRO, we propose a simplified version of CRO (SCRO) for the optimal PMU placement (OPP) problem. Both canonical CRO and SCRO are tested on the full observability of OPP in two scenarios, i.e., considering and not considering zero injections. To investigate the effectiveness of the proposed methods, we evaluate their performances in the IEEE 14-bus, 30-bus, 57-bus, 118-bus, and 300-bus standard systems as well as a large-scale system with 1180 buses. Our simulation results show that, compared with other deterministic and metaheuristc algorithms, SCRO can find the optimal solutions in a shorter time for small-scale systems, and a near-optimal solution within a reasonable time even for a large-scale system.