A Community-based Partitioning Approach for Phasor Measurement Unit Placement in Large Systems

A phasor measurement unit placement scheme is developed in this article that ensures complete observability of large systems while reducing the computational burden of optimization. Redundancy in measurement of the critical buses of the network that are identified based on system studies and/or topologies is also provided by the proposed methodology. The community-based islanding approach initially partitions the system into smaller islands. Placement of phasor measurement units in these islands is then computed using integer linear programming. A bound is also developed to find the maximum error from a global optimal solution. The proposed technique is applied to standard IEEE systems as well as on more realistic power system networks. The results indicate that the proposed technique optimizes the benefits of having phasor measurement units at strategic locations of a large power system network without the associated computational burdens.