Grid Controllability Aware Optimal Placement of PMUs with Limited Input Current Channels

This paper proposes a novel approach for optimal placement of phasor measurement units (PMUs) targeting smart grid controllability under perturbed system conditions while ensuring system observability. In determining the optimal number of required PMUs, as a practical consideration, PMUs are considered to have limited number of input channels. A weighted least square optimization problem with a continuous relaxation is considered for the discrete binary constraint. A perturbation-robust algorithm is developed for a global optimal solution that achieves optimal PMU placement. The efficacy of the proposed smart grid monitoring instrumentation approach is validated on IEEE 6, 14, 30, 57, and 118-bus systems. The grid perturbations are represented with node weights using a small signal modeling approach. The results demonstrate that, unlike the conventional system observability-aware PMU deployment, the proposed instrumentation strategy ensures system controllability under generic perturbation conditions with a revised PMU placement vector of reduced size in all the test cases.