An Efficient Method for Smart Grid Fault Observation with Minimum PMUs

Abstract

A power system may have buses that cannot be installed with PMUs for reasons such as non-availability of communication facility, inconvenience in installing PMUs and severe limitation on number of channels of PMUs. Such buses, when identified, are modeled as proposed in this paper. The only solution and partial set of solutions to the fault observability problem (FOP) may not be implemented when such buses are not already known. Therefore, it becomes necessary to determine complete set of solutions to the FOP. A simple yet robust method capable of delivering complete set of global optimal solutions and complete set of the best global optimal solutions to the FOP is proposed in this paper. The method is illustrated through a sample network and it is applied to a real-world transmission system. The illustration and the simulation results on the IEEE 14-Bus system and the IEEE 30-Bus system show that the proposed method is superior to the known methods. The real-world application shows practical importance of the proposed method.