Power system observability with minimal phasor measurement placement

The placement of a minimal set of phasor measurement units (PMUs) so as to make the system measurement model observable, and thereby linear, is investigated. A PMU placed at a bus measures the voltage as well as all the current phasors at that bus, requiring the extension of the topological observability theory. In particular, the concept of spanning tree is extended to that of spanning measurement subgraph with an actual or a pseudomeasurement assigned to each of its branches. The minimal PMU set is found through a dual search algorithm which uses both a modified bisecting search and a simulated-annealing-based method. The former fixes the number of PMUs while the latter looks for a placement set that leads to an observable network for a fixed number of PMUs. In order to accelerate the procedure, an initial PMU placement is provided by a graph-theoretic procedure which builds a spanning measurement subgraph according to a depth-first search. From computer simulation results for various test systems it appears that only one fourth to one third of the system buses need to be provided with PMUs in order to make the system observable