Multi-Objective Optimization for Power Quality Monitors Aiming to Maximum the Observability of Voltage Sags and Fault Location

With the emergence of active distribution networks, the monitoring of it has become progressively critical to record voltage sags and locate the faults. The optimum assignment of Power Quality Monitors (PQMs) to implement utter observability is a crucial issue in the design of monitoring system. Nevertheless, the expense of realizing full observability is prohibitive. Hence, it is acceptable to surrender a certain ratio of observability for cost-effective planning. For this reason, a multi-objective approach was presented to tackle the issue of PQMs assignment in active distribution networks, regarding observability of voltage sags, observability of fault location and number of PQMs. Considering the situation that the budget of grid company may be insufficient to install all the PQMs at once, the assignment sequence was calculated to decide at which node to be installed at first. The multi-objective approach was tackled by Multi-objective Bonobo Optimizer and verified on the IEEE 69-node radial distribution network. Consequently, 70.42% observability of voltage sags and 92.65% observability of fault location was implemented through 21.74% PQMs. The acquired results demonstrate the effectiveness of the presented method. This study will provide guidance on the installation location of PQMs.