Optimal Substation Coverage for Phasor Measurement Unit Installations

The Phasor Measurement Unit (PMU) has been found to carry great deal of value for applications in the wide area monitoring of power systems. Historically, deployment of these devices has been limited by the prohibitive cost of the device itself. Therefore, the objective of the conventional optimal PMU placement problem is to find the minimum number devices, which if carefully placed throughout the network, either maximize observability or completely observe subject to different constraints. Now due to improved technology and digital relays serving a dual use as relay & PMU, the cost of the PMU device itself is not the largest portion of the deployment cost, but rather the substation installation. This book presents a technique proposed to minimize the number of substation installations thus indirectly minimizing the synchrophasor deployment costs.