Co-Optimal Placement of Measurement Devices and Their Related Communication Infrastructure in Wide Area Measurement Systems

The term wide area measurement system (WAMS) implies a system including new digital metering devices (e.g., phasor measurement unit) together with communication system which is designed for monitoring, operating, and controlling power systems. Generally, a WAMS process includes three main functions: data acquisition, data transmitting, and data processing performed by measurement devices, communication systems, and energy management systems, respectively. While these three functions are seriously interdependent, most researches carried out on this topic investigate these functions independently. In this paper, meters placement and their required communication infrastructure for state estimation program are co-optimized simultaneously. To perform this, these two planning issues are jointly formulated in a single genetic algorithm (GA) problem. Then, three IEEE test networks without any conventional measurements and communications are used to investigate the advantages of considering dependability of optimization of these two sections. The results confirm that the proposed method is advantageous over the techniques optimizing each section independently. The results indicate that while the total number of measurement devices for system observability may increase (and therefore, the observability is improved), the total cost for the plan is reduced.