Optimal Multistage PMU Placement for Wide-Area Monitoring

Abstract—This paper proposes a novel optimization model to maximize the power system observability by placing phasor mea-surement units (PMUs) in a multistage manner. The problem is constrained by the financial budgets available at each installation stage. The budget may be spent on purchasing and installing new PMUs and relocating PMUs already installed in the power system. This problem is very difficult to solve when the problem size becomes big. Therefore, a newly developed meta-heuristic, called chemical reaction optimization (CRO), is used to solve this optimal multistage PMU placement problem (OMPP), and numerical studies are carried out on the IEEE 57-bus, 118-bus, and 300-bus systems. Index Terms—Chemical reaction optimization (CRO), optimal PMU placement, phasor measurement unit (PMU), power system monitoring, smart grid, synchrophasor. I