Optimal location of PMUs for full observability of power system using coronavirus herd immunity optimizer

Phasor measurement units (PMU) are currently considered as an essential step toward the future smart grid due to their capability in increasing the power system's situation awareness. Due to their high costs and limited resources, optimal placement of PMUs (OPP) is an important challenge to compute the minimum number of PMUs and their optimal distribution in the power systems for achieving full monitoring. The coronavirus herd immunity optimizer (CHIO) is a novel optimization algorithm that emulates the flock immunity strategies for the elimination of the coronavirus pandemic. In this research, the CHIO is adapted for the OPP problem for full fault observability. The proposed algorithm is implemented on power systems considering the zero injection bus impacts. A program is created in MATLAB (R) environment to implement the proposed algorithm. The algorithm is applied to different test systems including; IEEE 9-bus, 14-bus, 30bus, 118-bus, 300-bus, New England 39-bus and Polish 2383-bus. The proposed CHIO-based OPP is compared to some exact and metaheuristic-based OPP techniques. Compared to these techniques, the promising results have proved the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed CHIO to solve the OPP problem for full fault observability.