A novel approach for optimal placement of PMUs with minimum measurement channels

Power System Observability is essential for monitoring and control of a power system, hence placement of Phasor Measurement Units (PMUs) must ensure both topological and numerical observability for complete observability. Moreover, it is important to modify the cost function which indicates the cost associated with the number of measurement channels of a PMU. This paper presents an algorithm to achieve complete power system observability while ensuring minimum number of channels associated with the given placement. Minimization of channels has been achieved by assigning cost to measurement channels and by using Gaussian elimination to ensure minimum number of measurement channels for a given PMU placement. Both the techniques have been demonstrated considering IEEE 9-Bus, 14-Bus Systems.