Control reconfigurability-based placement strategy for FACTS devices

This paper considers the placement of Flexible AC transmission system devices into power systems with a criterion of maintaining a prescribed level of control reconfigurability. Control reconfigurability in this paper measures the small signal combined controllability and observability of a power system with an additional requirement on tolerance to loss of measurement data in any single measurement unit in the system, which have not been considered in the existing works. Control device placement is formulated as an optimization problem of finding a minimum number of new control devices to meet a prescribed control reconfigurability threshold. A binary search algorithm and a genetic algorithm are applied to Thyristor Controlled Series Compensators into a number of IEEE test systems. More specifically, Placement results for 14, 30, 57 and 118-bus IEEE test systems are presented.