A Unified Framework for Wide Area Measurement System Planning

TL;DR

This paper introduces a comprehensive, multi-objective framework for planning Wide Area Measurement Systems in power grids, balancing cost, reliability, and data traffic to optimize system observability and performance.

Contribution

It presents a unified, multi-objective optimization framework that considers practical factors like cost, reliability, and communication traffic in WAMS planning, offering multiple Pareto solutions.

Findings

Framework verified on IEEE test systems

Demonstrates trade-offs among objectives

Achieves minimal cost full observability

Abstract

Wide area measurement system (WAMS) is one of the essential components in the future power system. To make WAMS construction plans, practical models of the power network observability, reliability, and underlying communication infrastructures need to be considered. To address this challenging problem, in this paper we propose a unified framework for WAMS planning to cover most realistic concerns in the construction process. The framework jointly optimizes the system construction cost, measurement reliability, and volume of synchrophasor data traffic resulting in a multi-objective optimization problem, which provides multiple Pareto optimal solutions to suit different requirements by the utilities. The framework is verified on two IEEE test systems. The simulation results demonstrate the trade-off relationships among the proposed objectives. Moreover, the proposed framework can develop optimal WAMS plans for full observability with minimal cost. This work develops a comprehensive framework for most practical WAMS construction designs.