Optimal PMU placement using best first search algorithm with pruning

This paper utilizes best first search (BFS) algorithm to determine the optimal placement of phasor measurement units (PMUs) for complete observability of a power system under normal operating conditions. The additional redundancy offered by this method has been removed by applying a pruning technique to further minimize the number of PMUs determined by BFS algorithm. The proposed method has been used to determine the optimal PMU placement solutions for the standard IEEE 14-bus system, IEEE 30-bus system and a practical 246-bus Indian system. The results obtained with the proposed method have been compared with the existing methods such as integer linear programming. It has been found that the proposed method is able to achieve the complete system observability with the minimum number of PMUs required.