Optimal PMU Placement Considering Contingencies by Using a Hybrid Discrete Particle Swarm Optimization Technique

This paper presents a Hybrid Discrete Particle Swarm Optimization Technique (HDPSO) for the solution of optimal placement of Phasor Measurement Unit (PMU) in smart grids. In this paper, the optimal PMU placement (OPP) is considered as an integer valued optimization problem which is hard to solve due to considering various conditions of power network including the base case state, effects of conventional measurements and contingencies such as single measurement loss or single branch outage. The proposed HDPSO is based on the quantum particle swarm optimization algorithm which has a good convergence behavior. To increase the efficiency of the proposed HDPSO the concepts of time varying coefficients are incorporated to the proposed algorithm. Besides, a new neighborhood topology namely Stochastic Based String (SBS) topology is introduced. The proposed SBS topology prevents the particles to rush toward obtained local best solutions at the beginning of the search process. The efficiency of the proposed method is verified by the simulation results of IEEE 14-bus, 30-bus, New England 39-bus, 57-bus and 118 bus systems, respectively. The results are also compared with some newly methods in the area which verify, our proposed method as a novel solution method to obtain reliable measurement system with the least number of PMUs. Copyright (C) 2011 Praise Worthy Prize S.r.l. - All rights reserved.