A new scalable solution to optimal PMU placement under a long-run data availability criterion

This paper presents a method for optimal placement of additional phase measurement units (PMUs) into a power system. The objective is to meet a specified data availability requirement at all buses with a minimum number of additional sensors. Data availability is important in high reporting rate applications, such as wide area monitoring and control for blackout mitigation. The long-run data availabilities are solved from a controlled Markov chain where binary variables indicating placement decisions are embedded as stationary control variables. The new development in this paper is on the reformulation of the optimal placement problem to significantly reduce the computational burden encountered previously in the availability-based sensor placement. This is accomplished by exploiting the structure of the underlying power system so that the new equivalent placement formulation results in a complexity that grows linearly with the number of buses in the system, rather than exponentially without reformulation. The new problem formulation is applied to the IEEE 14-bus and 118-bus test systems, and the placement results are presented.