Optimal Placement of Limited PMUs for Transmission Line Outage Detection and Identification

TL;DR

This paper formulates an optimization approach for placing a limited number of PMUs in power systems to enhance line outage detection and identification, demonstrating improved results over other placement strategies.

Contribution

It introduces a novel optimization framework for optimal PMU placement specifically for outage detection, using heuristic algorithms like genetic algorithms.

Findings

Optimal placement improves outage detection accuracy.

Genetic algorithm effectively finds near-optimal PMU configurations.

Enhanced detection performance over traditional placement methods.

Abstract

Phasor Measurement Unit (PMU) technology is increasingly used for real-time monitoring applications, especially line outage detection and identification (D&I) in the power system. Current outage D&I schemes either assume a full PMU deployment or a partial deployment with fixed PMU placement. However, the placement of the PMUs has a fundamental impact on the effectiveness of the D&I scheme. Building on a dynamic relationship between the substation voltage phase angle and active power, we formulated the optimal PMU placement problem for outage D&I as an optimization problem readily solvable by any heuristic algorithm. We tested the formulation using a genetic algorithm and simulated outages of IEEE 39 bus system. The optimal placement found produces a better D&I result of single-line outages than a randomly scattered, tree-like, and degree-based placements.