A Multi-objective Placement of Phasor Measurement Units Considering Observability and Measurement Redundancy using Firefly Algorithm

This paper proposes a multi-objective optimal placement method of Phasor Measurement Units (PMUs) in large electric transmission systems. It is proposed for minimizing the number of PMUs for complete system observability and maximizing measurement redundancy of the buses, simultaneously. The measurement redundancy of the bus indicates that number of times a bus is able to monitor more than once by PMUs set. A high level of measurement redundancy can maximize the system observability and it is required for a reliable power system state estimation. Therefore, simultaneous optimizations of the two conflicting objectives are performed using a binary coded firefly algorithm. The complete observability of the power system is first prepared and then, single line loss contingency condition is added to the main model. The practical measurement limitation of PMUs is also considered. The efficiency of the proposed method is validated on IEEE 14, 30, 57 and 118 bus test systems and a real and large- scale Polish 2383 bus system. The valuable approach of firefly algorithm is demonstrated in finding the optimal number of PMUs and their locations by comparing its performance with earlier works.