A novel power quality monitoring allocation algorithm

Distributed measurement architecture, due to its efficiency, is used to monitor the power quality in the electric systems. This paper introduces a novel algorithm to determine the optimum allocations of power quality monitors to reduce the cost of the distributed monitoring system taking into account the data redundancy. The optimization problem is formulated as a covering and packing one which can be manipulated by integer linear program algorithms. The appropriate constraints are deduced by the electrical circuit topology independent of the load parameters. In addition, the problem is adopted to a general form which can be implemented by any optimization package. The proposed algorithm is applied to five different systems for validation. Then, the results are discussed in terms of the cost and data redundancy.