Optimal geographical placement of phasor measurement units based on clustering techniques

© 2016 IEEE. In this paper, we propose an optimal deployment of phasor measurement units (PMUs), devices that allow the measurements of voltage and current parameters in electrical power systems (EPS). We assume a geo-referenced scenery and candidate places for the location of PMU's on each system node. We consider an optimization model to minimize the number of PMU's in the electrical system under a percentage of system observability. We use pseudo-optimal clustering techniques that allow us to contrast with the optimization model where the lowest number of PMUs are activated with the best system observability; therefore, through this research it is proposed an homogeneous group of EPS nodes, considering the minimum and maximum quantity of nodes that belong to the cluster-centroid; furthermore, we consider take the feasible and candidates system nodes, and the maximum link distance is proposed like a restriction, for the PMU placement on each system node, and it is determines which the observability percentage.