Observability and estimation of transformer tap setting with minimal PMU placement

One of the most important applications of phasor measurement units (PMUs) is power system state estimation. Some models have been proposed for including phasor measurements in the state estimation. But, all of these models have treated transformer tap settings (voltage transformer turns ratio and phase-shift transformer angle) as fixed parameters of the network. The accuracy of state estimation may decrease when a tap changes or the true value is unknown. In this paper, each transformer tap setting is added as a new state variable to the states vector, converting the linear PMU based state estimation to a nonlinear one. Also, the network observability is analyzed including the observability of transformer tap setting by changing the network topology to include tap setting observability in the optimal PMU placement problem. The proposed method is applied to the IEEE test systems and the results are presented.