Cost Minimization in Power System Measurement Placement

This paper presents an innovative method for the placement optimization of power system measurement. The goal of the method is to minimize the number of necessary measurements and required remote terminal units (RTUs), subject to the system observability requirements. Three types of measurements are considered: bus voltage magnitude measurements, branch power flow measurements and bus injection power flow measurements. A fast algorithm for building up the spanning tree in the observability analysis is developed and applied for the measurement placing process. The algorithm consists of two steps. First, the branch power flow and bus voltage magnitude measurements are placed. The spanning tree of the network is selected by choosing the branches that are connected to the buses with large numbers of incident branches. Once the spanning tree is decided, branch power flow measurements are placed on its branches and installed into as few substations as possible. A voltage measurement is also placed in a substation that already has at least one branch measurement installed. Second, the bus injection power flow measurements are placed in selected substations to backup the branch measurements and add up to the robustness of the measurement placement scheme against the loss of observability. The proposed method can be used as a very helpful tool in planning power network measurement systems.