IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON POWER SYSTEMS, VOL. 23, NO.

3, AUGUST 2008 1525

Optimal Placement of PMUs by Integer Linear Programming
Bei Gou, Member, IEEE
AbstractThis letter presents a simple optimal placement
algorithm of phasor measurement units (PMU) by using integer
linear programming. Cases with and without conventional power
ow and injection measurements are considered. The measure-
ment placement problems under those cases are formulated as an
integer linear programming which saves the CPU computation
time greatly. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm
can be used in practice.
Index TermsInteger linear programming, observability anal-
ysis, phasor measurement units.
I. INTRODUCTION
P
HASOR measure units (PMU) become more and more at-
tractive to power engineers because they can provide syn-
chronized measurements of real-time phasors of voltage and
currents [1]. As the sole system monitor, state estimator plays
an important role in the security of power system operations.
Optimal placement of PMUs in power systems to enhance state
estimation is a problem that needs to be solved. Several algo-
rithms and approaches have been published in the literature.
An algorithm which nds the minimal set of PMU place-
ment needed for power system state estimation has been de-
veloped in [2] and [3], where the graph theory and the simu-
lated annealing method have been used to achieve the goal. In
[4], a strategic PMU placement algorithm is developed to im-
prove the bad data processing capability of state estimation by
taking advantage of the PMU technology. Techniques for iden-
tifying placement sites for phasor measurement units in a power
system based on incomplete observability are presented in [1],
where simulated annealing method is used to solve the prag-
matic communication-constrained PMU placement problem. In
[5], a special tailored nondominated sorting genetic algorithmis
developed for the PMU placement problem. The authors in [6]
developed an optimal placement algorithm for PMUs by using
integer programming. However, the proposed integer program-
ming becomes a nonlinear integer programming under the exis-
tence of conventional power ow or power injection measure-
ments.
In this letter, a similar formulation of optimal PMU place-
ment problem is proposed by integer linear programming. The
contribution of this letter is that the proposed formulation is
linear with and without conventional power ow and power in-
jection measurements. Therefore, the solution of the optimal
PMU placement problem is more efcient and can be used in
practice.
Manuscript received January 5, 2007; revised April 23, 2007. Paper no.
PESL-00108-2006.
The author is with the Energy System Research Center, University of Texas
at Arlington, Arlington, TX 76019 USA (e-mail: bgou@uta.edu).
Color versions of one or more of the gures in this paper are available online
at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.
Digital Object Identier 10.1109/TPWRS.2008.926723
II. FORMULATION OF THE PROBLEM
A. Without Conventional Measurements
A PMU, different from traditional meters, is able to measure
the voltage phasor of the installed bus and the current phasors
of all the lines connecting to this bus. That is to say, a PMU
can make the installed bus and its neighboring buses observable.
The objective of placing PMUs in power systems is to decide a
minimal set of PMUs such that the whole system is observable.
Therefore, the placement of PMUs becomes a problem that
nds a minimal set of PMUs such that a bus must be reached
at least once by the set of the PMUs. This gives us an idea to
dene a matrix (it is matrix in [6] and see the details
in [6]).
Now the optimal placement of PMUs can be formulated as a
problem of integer linear programming, as follows:
where and is the PMU placement
variable.
B. With Conventional Measurements
In this letter, we only consider power owand power injection
measurements, and we assume they are in pairs.
Let us dene a vector . The element
of indicates the number of times for
bus reached by PMUs, where is the th row of
and is the th element of . For either a power
ow or a power injection measurement, one of the associate
buses can be solved by the measurement. In another word, for
a power ow or an injection measurement, the element of
corresponding to one of the associated bus of the measurement
can be zero, while the remainder has to be at least one.
For detail discussion, the following three cases need to be
analyzed.
1) If a power ow measurement is on line , then the fol-
lowing needs to be held:
which means one bus voltage can be solved from this mea-
surement and the other needs to be covered by PUM.
0885-8950/$25.00 2008 IEEE
1526 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON POWER SYSTEMS, VOL. 23, NO. 3, AUGUST 2008
2) Suppose that an injection measurement is at bus as fol-
lows.
Then the following inequality needs to be held:
3) The power ow measurements and the injection measure-
ments are associated.
According to the approaches introduced in 1) and 2), we have
the following two inequalities:
and
In order to satisfy , the rst inequality needs to
be subscribed from the second inequality corresponding to the
injection measurement , and
consider that its right-hand side needs to be reduced by one due
to the injection , the second inequality becomes .
If bus is not associated to any conventional measurements,
then the corresponding constraint of the minimization problem
in section is still kept .
Therefore, based on the three cases given above, if we rst
order the buses without associated conventional measurements,
then the constraint considering the conventional measurements
becomes
where and are formed as introduced in the above
three cases, is a permutation matrix, and is the number of
buses not associated to conventional measurements.
Therefore, when considering the conventional measurements,
the optimal placement of PMUs can be formulated as a problem
of integer linear programming, as follows:
III. SIMULATION RESULTS
Due to space limitations, we only use the IEEE 14-bus system
as the example (see Fig. 1). We use the binary integer program-
ming of Matlab to solve this problem.
A. Without Conventional Measurements
The optimal problem in Section II-A generates the results as
follows:
Fig. 1. IEEE 14-bus system.
which means we need to place PMUs at bus 2, 6, 8, and 9 such
that the whole system is observable.
B. With Conventional Measurements
We add a zero injection measurement at bus 7 and no other
power ow and injection measurements. We form the optimiza-
tion problemformulation with the constraint for this pair of zero
injection measurement
where the four elements corresponding to buses 4, 7, 8, and 9
The solution indicates that PMUs need to be installed at buses
2, 6, and 9, which is identical with the solution in [6].
IV. CONCLUSION
This letter proposes a simple algorithm of optimal placement
of PMUs in power systems by using integer linear program-
ming. Besides the placement of mere PMUs, this letter also
considers the placement of PMUs when conventional measure-
ments are present in the system. Simulation results show that
the proposed algorithm is computational efciency and can be
used in practice.
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