Optimal placement of phasor and conventional measurements for power system state estimation and fault observability

The advent of phasor measurement units (PMU) has sparked the development of applications to accommodate synchronized measurements provided by PMUs. However, incorporating PMUs in a power system is a challenge because synchrophasor measurement technology (SMT) is a very limited resource and there are numerous applications competing for SMT measurements. How each application benefits from SMT is contingent to a PMU´s location on a network. Hence, a utility may not employ an isolated application specific PMU placement if its benefits to parallel applications are unclear. Most studies have achieved observability for state estimation with 30% PMU network coverage and 50% coverage for fault analysis. However 50% percent network coverage might not be achieved in the near future. Using a transformed integer linear programming formulation, this paper presents a joint placement of PMU and conventional measurements for state estimation and fault observability with less PMU.