A New Approach for Optimal Placement of PMUs and Their Required Communication Infrastructure in Order to Minimize the Cost of the WAMS

In recent years, power utilities have been designing and implementing wide area measurement system (WAMS) to provide more intelligent monitoring, control, and protection for the power grid. In this paper, a new method is presented for the optimization of the cost of different parts of the WAMS. In this method, the cost of optimal placement of phasor measurement units (PMUs) and a phasor data concentrator (PDC), as well as their associated communication infrastructure (CI) are simultaneously considered and minimized. For this purpose, the binary imperialistic competition algorithm is used for the optimal placement of PMUs. Dijkstra's single-source shortest-path algorithm is used to obtain the minimum CI cost. It is also used for optimal placement of PDC. Because of the good adaptability of the proposed methodology to understudy problem, the proposed method is implemented in different conditions of the power network such as N - 1 contingency condition (e.g., a single-line outage or a single-PMU outage), and some important and practical considerations are provided. Practical considerations are the availability of preinstalled PMUs in some buses and the availability of the communication links in some parts of the power network. The effectiveness of the proposed method is verified on different IEEE standard test systems.