Integrated mutation strategy with modified binary PSO algorithm for optimal PMU placement

Abstract

Optimal phasor measurement units (PMUs) placement refers to the strategic placement of PMUs to achieve the full observability of power systems with a minimum number of PMUs. A strategic placement is needed because of the economic or technical restriction that hinders the deployment of PMUs on every bus. A modified version of the binary particle swarm optimization (BPSO) method is proposed in this paper by integrating a mutation strategy and the V-shaped sigmoid function for placing the PMUs that maintains the full power system observability in the presence of zero-injection bus, single PMU loss and PMU’s channel limits while maximizing the measurement redundancy. The solution that has the highest measurement redundancy was selected as the best placement of PMUs. The use of mutation strategy and V-shaped sigmoid function in this paper improves the population diversity, thereby minimizing the chance of the particles being trapped in the local optima, consequently leading to a quality solution. In order to validate its effectiveness, the results obtained by the proposed method are compared with other published techniques to demonstrate the accuracy and validity of the proposed technique. The results of the IEEE 300-bus system show that the proposed method effectively managed to reduce the number of PMUs needed.