Optimal meter placement for maintaining observability during single branch outages

This paper presents a method for designing measurement systems, that will not only make the systems observable, but also will maintain observability against loss of network branches. A linear programming based solution is proposed for choosing a measurement configuration that will make the system fully observable. Subsequently, a systematic method of appending a minimum number of additional measurements to ensure full observability against branch outages, is described. Contingencies considered in this paper relate to the loss of any single branch. However, the method can be extended to the case of multiple contingencies, provided the cost of adding more meters is financially justifiable. Numerical examples illustrating the proposed method, are given in the paper.