Phasor measurement unit placement framework for enhanced wide‐area situational awareness

The wide‐area situational awareness (SA) aims at an early detection of impending system instability and to alert system operator to take necessary actions. Since a critical situation may be triggered in a system because of various reasons, a wide‐area monitoring system needs to consider several practical factors while deploying phasor measurement units (PMUs) in the grid. This study proposes a systematic framework for analysing the suitability of limited candidate PMU locations with respect to multiple applications, which, in turn, would enhance the SA of the system operator. Five factors are chosen for assessing the potential of a PMU site viz., improving state estimation, assessing voltage, angular stability, monitoring tie‐line oscillations and the availability of communication infrastructure. To quantify the contribution of each application in enhancing the SA, five respective factors are proposed. These five factors are finally integrated in the proposed framework using fuzzy technique for order of preference by similarity to ideal solution. The scope of this work, however, is not limited only to these five factors. PMU locations can be evaluated for any number of practical criteria. The proposed scheme is demonstrated on IEEE 14‐bus system and Northern Regional Power Grid 246‐bus Indian system. The proposed methodology enhances the SA by ranking and recognising the potential PMU locations, and placing them in a phased manner.