PMU placement and error control using belief propagation

The placement of phasor measurement units (PMUs) is of particular importance in supervising the health of the grid. The optimal placement of PMUs is a well-known integer program (IP) and is thus known to be hard to solve. This paper studies a linear integer program formulation of the PMU placement problem, and demonstrates that it can be solved efficiently and in a distributed manner using an affinity propagation (AP) framework. In other words, when the AP algorithm converges, it results in a local optima for the original PMU placement problem. Further, for PMUs that suffer from measurement error, this paper develops a placement mechanism with built-in redundancy to perform error detection and correction. A distributed algorithm to perform error control over the grid is presented. In effect, local communication between nodes in the power grid can be used to verify the correctness of PMU measurements, thus detecting and isolating PMUs that are reporting erroneous values. Performance of our algorithms for several IEEE bus systems is presented.