An Improved Measurement Placement Algorithm for Network Observability

This paper presents a fast method for multiple measurement placement for systems that are found to be unobservable. Upon placement of multiple measurements, all observable islands will be merged together and the entire system will be rendered fully observable. The method uses a test matrix whose leading dimension is determined by the rank deficiency of the gain matrix. Therefore, even for very large systems, as long as the number of measurements to be placed is relatively low, the proposed method will maintain its computational advantage. Compared to the existing iterative approaches, this method directly provides the entire set of additional measurements for placement. The method is developed based on the authors' previous work 4 where a direct method for observability analysis was presented.