Minimizing the Cost of Wide Area Monitoring Systems by Optimal Allocation of PMUs and Their Communication Infrastructure

Power system utilities need to replace the conventional measuring and monitoring devices to the phasor measurement units (PMUs)-based wide area monitoring system (WAMS) to be able to move from conventional to smart grids. The challenge of this action is the cost of WAMS. Many researchers have tried to deal with this challenge by optimal allocation of PMUs to find the minimum number that fulfils the full observability of the system. The WAMS is not only PMUs but also it comprises communication infrastructures (CI) such as communication links, switches and phasor data concentrators. This paper proposes an optimization algorithm to solve the problem based on two strategies. In the first strategy, the objective function is to find the minimum number of PMUs, i.e. conventional objective function. While in the second strategy, the objective function is the minimum cost of the WAMS, i.e. cost of PMUs and their CI. The objective function in the two strategies is solved under normal operating condition and under contingencies such as failure of PMU and outage of network lines. The proposed artificial electric field algorithm (AEFA) is applied using two strategies on IEEE standard networks: 14-bus, 30-bus, 57-bus and 118-bus. The results show that the number of PMUs using two strategies is not the same and this means that the second strategy should be chosen to solve this problem. The results are also compared with other optimization algorithms, and they depict that the AEFA has the efficiency and superiority to find minimum cost of WAMS and lesser distance path of establishing communication links with higher observability.