IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON POWER SYSTEMS, VOL. 23, NO.

3, AUGUST 2008

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Optimal Placement of PMUs by Integer Linear Programming

Bei Gou, Member, IEEE

AbstractThis letter presents a simple optimal placement algorithm of phasor measurement units (PMU) by using integer linear programming. Cases with and without conventional power ow and injection measurements are considered. The measurement placement problems under those cases are formulated as an integer linear programming which saves the CPU computation time greatly. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm can be used in practice. Index TermsInteger linear programming, observability analysis, phasor measurement units.

II. FORMULATION OF THE PROBLEM A. Without Conventional Measurements A PMU, different from traditional meters, is able to measure the voltage phasor of the installed bus and the current phasors of all the lines connecting to this bus. That is to say, a PMU can make the installed bus and its neighboring buses observable. The objective of placing PMUs in power systems is to decide a minimal set of PMUs such that the whole system is observable. Therefore, the placement of PMUs becomes a problem that nds a minimal set of PMUs such that a bus must be reached at least once by the set of the PMUs. This gives us an idea to (it is matrix in [6] and see the details dene a matrix in [6]). Now the optimal placement of PMUs can be formulated as a problem of integer linear programming, as follows:

I. INTRODUCTION

HASOR measure units (PMU) become more and more attractive to power engineers because they can provide synchronized measurements of real-time phasors of voltage and currents [1]. As the sole system monitor, state estimator plays an important role in the security of power system operations. Optimal placement of PMUs in power systems to enhance state estimation is a problem that needs to be solved. Several algorithms and approaches have been published in the literature. An algorithm which nds the minimal set of PMU placement needed for power system state estimation has been developed in [2] and [3], where the graph theory and the simulated annealing method have been used to achieve the goal. In [4], a strategic PMU placement algorithm is developed to improve the bad data processing capability of state estimation by taking advantage of the PMU technology. Techniques for identifying placement sites for phasor measurement units in a power system based on incomplete observability are presented in [1], where simulated annealing method is used to solve the pragmatic communication-constrained PMU placement problem. In [5], a special tailored nondominated sorting genetic algorithm is developed for the PMU placement problem. The authors in [6] developed an optimal placement algorithm for PMUs by using integer programming. However, the proposed integer programming becomes a nonlinear integer programming under the existence of conventional power ow or power injection measurements. In this letter, a similar formulation of optimal PMU placement problem is proposed by integer linear programming. The contribution of this letter is that the proposed formulation is linear with and without conventional power ow and power injection measurements. Therefore, the solution of the optimal PMU placement problem is more efcient and can be used in practice.
Manuscript received January 5, 2007; revised April 23, 2007. Paper no. PESL-00108-2006. The author is with the Energy System Research Center, University of Texas at Arlington, Arlington, TX 76019 USA (e-mail: bgou@uta.edu). Color versions of one or more of the gures in this paper are available online at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org. Digital Object Identier 10.1109/TPWRS.2008.926723

where variable.

and

is the PMU placement

B. With Conventional Measurements In this letter, we only consider power ow and power injection measurements, and we assume they are in pairs. . The element Let us dene a vector of indicates the number of times for is the th row of bus reached by PMUs, where and is the th element of . For either a power ow or a power injection measurement, one of the associate buses can be solved by the measurement. In another word, for a power ow or an injection measurement, the element of corresponding to one of the associated bus of the measurement can be zero, while the remainder has to be at least one. For detail discussion, the following three cases need to be analyzed. 1) If a power ow measurement is on line lowing needs to be held: , then the fol-

which means one bus voltage can be solved from this measurement and the other needs to be covered by PUM.

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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON POWER SYSTEMS, VOL. 23, NO. 3, AUGUST 2008

2) Suppose that an injection measurement is at bus lows.

as fol-

Then the following inequality needs to be held:

3) The power ow measurements and the injection measurements are associated.

Fig. 1. IEEE 14-bus system.

According to the approaches introduced in 1) and 2), we have the following two inequalities: and In order to satisfy , the rst inequality needs to be subscribed from the second inequality corresponding to the , and injection measurement consider that its right-hand side needs to be reduced by one due . to the injection , the second inequality becomes If bus is not associated to any conventional measurements, then the corresponding constraint of the minimization problem . in section is still kept Therefore, based on the three cases given above, if we rst order the buses without associated conventional measurements, then the constraint considering the conventional measurements becomes

which means we need to place PMUs at bus 2, 6, 8, and 9 such that the whole system is observable. B. With Conventional Measurements We add a zero injection measurement at bus 7 and no other power ow and injection measurements. We form the optimization problem formulation with the constraint for this pair of zero injection measurement

where the four elements corresponding to buses 4, 7, 8, and 9

The solution indicates that PMUs need to be installed at buses 2, 6, and 9, which is identical with the solution in [6]. IV. CONCLUSION

where and are formed as introduced in the above is the number of three cases, is a permutation matrix, and buses not associated to conventional measurements. Therefore, when considering the conventional measurements, the optimal placement of PMUs can be formulated as a problem of integer linear programming, as follows:

This letter proposes a simple algorithm of optimal placement of PMUs in power systems by using integer linear programming. Besides the placement of mere PMUs, this letter also considers the placement of PMUs when conventional measurements are present in the system. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm is computational efciency and can be used in practice. REFERENCES
[1] R. F. Nuqui and A. G. Phadke, Phasor measurement unit placement techniques for complete and incomplete observability, IEEE Trans. Power Del., vol. 20, no. 4, pp. 2381, 2388, Oct. 2005. [2] L. Mili, T. Baldwin, and R. Adapa, Phasor measurement placement for voltage stability analysis of power systems, in Proc. 29th Conf. Decision and Control, Honolulu, HI, Dec. 1990, pp. 30333038. [3] T. L. Baldwin, L. Mili, M. B. Boisen, and R. Adapa, Power system observability with minimal phasor measurement placement, IEEE Trans. Power Syst., vol. 8, no. 2, pp. 707715, May 1993. [4] J. Chen and A. Abur, Placement of PMUs to enable bad data detection in state estimation, IEEE Trans. Power Syst., vol. 21, no. 4, pp. 16081615, Nov. 2006. [5] B. Milosevic and M. Begovic, Nondominated sorting genetic algorithm for optimal phasor measurement placement, IEEE Trans. Power Syst., vol. 18, no. 1, pp. 6975, Feb. 2003. [6] B. Xu and A. Abur, Observability analysis and measurement placement for systems with PMUs, in Proc. 2004 IEEE Power Eng. Soc. Conf. Exposition, Oct. 1013, 2004, vol. 2, pp. 943946.

III. SIMULATION RESULTS Due to space limitations, we only use the IEEE 14-bus system as the example (see Fig. 1). We use the binary integer programming of Matlab to solve this problem. A. Without Conventional Measurements The optimal problem in Section II-A generates the results as follows: