Abstract
This paper presents optimal placement of minimal set of Phasor Measurement Units (PMU's) and observability analysis of the network with PMU's. In order to find a observable system, a symbolic method which directly assigns an appropriate symbol for measurement or pseudo-measurement to every entry of node-branch incidence matrix is proposed. It is much simpler and easier to analyze the observability of the network with PMU's than the conventional ones. For the optimal PMU placement problem, two approaches which are based on a modified Simulated-Annealing (SA) method and a Direct Combination method are proposed. Some case studies with IEEE sample system are made to show the performance of the proposed methods are almost alike and more effective than the conventional simulated-annealing method. It is also shown that the Direct Combination method is more effective than the modified simulated-annealing one in the sense of computation burden. The results of this study showed also that the accuracy of power system estimation and system observability can be improved the proposed PMU placements.