IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON POWER SYSTEMS, VOL. 17, NO.
2, MAY 2002
PMU Configuration for System Dynamic
Performance Measurement in Large
Multiarea Power Systems
Innocent Kamwa, Senior Member, IEEE, and Robert Grondin, Senior Member, IEEE
Abstract—Effective assessment of the dynamic performance of
the power system requires wide-area information from properly
distributed phasor measurement units (PMUs). However, to maxi-
mize the information content of the captured signals, the sensors
need to be located appropriately, with due account given to the
structural properties underlying the given system. In this paper,
two numerical algorithms are proposed to achieve this goal. They
aim to maximize the overall sensor response while minimizing the
correlation among sensor outputs so as to minimize the redundant
information provided by multiple sensors. The sensor responses of
interest are the bus voltage magnitude, and the angle and frequency
coherency indexes, which are estimated by means of a statistical
sampling of power system response signals from a transient-sta-
bility program. Through the “successive addition” scheme, one of
these algorithms easily incorporates mandatory locations such as
tie-line busses and large generator step-up transformers. The pro-
posed approaches are first illustrated on the Hydro-Québec trans-
mission grid and then on a 9-area/67-bus/23-machine test network
designed with well-defined geographical boundaries and pre-spec-
ified weak interties between electrically coherent areas.
Index Terms—Digital fault recorders, optimal sensor location,
phasor measurement unit (PMU), state estimation, wide-area con-
trol, wide-area monitoring.
I. INTRODUCTION
I N contrast with practices today, the control and supervisory
agents of future power systems will exchange not only static
information (used, for instance, in the state estimator) [1]–[3] or
quasistatic information (used in load-frequency control) but also
dynamic synchronous information [4]–[7]. In various places all
over the world, researchers are trying to introduce in the oper-
ating mechanisms of primary controllers (power systems stabi-
lizers, for instance) and special protection systems for defence
plans, a new class of wide-area input data (so-called phasors),
accurately time-tagged and transferred at high throughput be-
tween measurement and decision/actuator units.
In addition, supplementing the dynamic information acqui-
sition system with artificial intelligence based on analytical
tools such as decision trees and expert systems could allow for
a measurement-based dynamic security assessment [8]. With
fast detection of real-time signatures associated with events an-
nouncing widespread system failure, this measurement-based
decision tool could initiate effective automatic corrective
Manuscript received February 23, 2001.
The authors are with Hydro-Quebec/IREQ, Power System Analysis,
Operation, and Control Department, Varennes, PQ J3X 1S1, Canada (e-mail:
kamwa@ireq.ca).
Publisher Item Identifier S 0885-8950(02)03820-8.
0885-8950/02$17.00 © 2002 IEEE
385
actions a few seconds ahead or display a short list of possible
preventive measures on the operator’s screen [8], [9].
Intuitively, comprehensive monitoring of the grid behavior
over time requires instrumentation of all its topological nodes.
In practice, in addition to being a sufficient but not necessary
condition, this naive view is countered by the curse of di-
mensionality [10], considering that a standalone medium-size
system requires between 500 and 1000 busses for an ade-
quate representation. There is also a cost issue: many meters
means high capital costs in terms of equipment, maintenance
and an information management system. Furthermore, any
single phasor measurement unit (PMU) addition to an already
well-equipped grid tends to compound the complexity of the
telecommunication infrastructure, with all the resulting relia-
bility issues. In this context, how can we minimize the number
of PMUs while maintaining “good” monitoring of the system
dynamic performance? When the state estimation concept was
first introduced at the end of the 1960s, Schweppe et al. [1]
immediately emphasized the importance of dispersing the me-
tering devices optimally throughout the grid so as to maximize
the achievable accuracy of the steady-state estimate from a
least-mean-squares filtering of the available measurements.
A direct synchronous measurement of the complete state
vector involving the actual phasors at all busses could, in the
long term, become an economically viable alternative to the
current iterative and approximate state estimation methods
[11]. However, with today’s technology, it seems important
to look for effective means to reduce the number of PMUs
required for inexpensive yet reliable real-time monitoring of
the system-wide dynamic behavior. Even with the significant
reduction in capital cost expected soon in large-scale PMU pro-
curement as the GPS technology spreads in consumer products,
the goal of minimizing their number is still as justifiable as it
was in the past for static-state estimation: simplification of the
telecommunication infrastructure with, as benefits, a reduced
computational burden on the central processing facilities,
enhanced reliability, and lower long-term maintenance costs.
In 1995, quite independently from the many authors who
have recently reported on this subject [12]–[15], Hydro-Québec
began to develop PMU placement algorithms aimed at max-
imizing the “amount of information” about disturbances that
can possibly be gleaned from a given restricted set of metered
busses, while minimizing cross correlation (i.e., redundancy) of
the bus measurements [16]. Implementation of these algorithms
supposed at first that a significant number of representative dis-
turbances had been simulated on the target network (short-cir-
386 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON POWER SYSTEMS, VOL. 17, NO. 2, MAY 2002

cuit with and without the loss of single or double lines, load dition, is the power spectral density [21] of while
and generation steps, etc.). These simulations were carried out is the cross spectrum of and . Interest-
for various operating scenarios, selected in a way very similar to ingly, the conditional entropy is an effective measure of the
the statistical sampling approach of [17]. Careful analysis of the electrical distance between busses and [20], [22]. It suffices
signal responses allows the candidate busses to be compared in to note that the complex coherency coefficient
a statistical framework according to the relevance and distinc-
tive nature of the information recorded at its location (i.e., over (3)
a significant number of operating scenarios and plausible dis-
turbances). the logarithm of which is integrated between 0 and in order
to obtain the conditional entropy, is equal to 1 whatever the fre-
II. PMU CONFIGURATION CRITERIA quency when . Since its logarithm then is 0, this corre-
Let us assume an -bus network: . sponds to a zero distance between the two busses with identical
We can first define a reduced set of busses, so-called candidate (or proportional) signal responses. By contrast, when the sig-
busses, among which we will select the appropriate PMU sites: nals are completely uncorrelated, their cross spectrum is
. Finally, the optimal sit- nearly 0, which raises and, hence, its integral, the cross
ting of selected among the candidates yields another set: entropy of and , to infinity. The latter measures how far the bus
. In other words, the is electrically from . A good PMU configuration should
problem consists of building the set while fulfilling some include only the busses that are electrically far from each other,
performance and admissibility criteria. The following formal i.e., busses with large cross entropy values.
setting is to be considered here. Let denote a set of
B. Information and Coherency
responses received by the PMU located at the candidate sites, in
a given operating scenario and for a given disturbance A group of busses is said to be coherent with respect to
angle stability when any network disturbance (busbar or line
(1) short-circuit, single- or multiple-line outage, load or generation
where is the time-response of the th bus variable at switching, etc.) applied outside the group results in all incre-
the discrete time-index time while is the number of sam- mental time variations and of the bus angle and
ples. Placement of PMU in the bus set frequency having the same sign within the group [18]. It is
is “optimal” if there is little or no loss of information when intuitively sound to state that the time variation of all phasors in
replacing the signal matrix by . In other a coherent group can be satisfactorily approximated by looking
words, if is a measure of the “information content” of at a single phasor appropriately selected from within the group.
signals associated with a bus set , we should try to ensure that Consequently, it is not necessary to place a PMU at all busses
. belonging to a coherent group. According to [18] and [19], two
busses are coherent for disturbance when the following
A. Information and Entropy criterion is below a specified threshold [see (4) at the bottom of
According to [20] and [21], one measure of the information the page], where is the time variation of variable at bus
content of a signal set is the norm of the corresponding entropy during the th disturbance while is the observation time
matrix, defined as follows [21, p. 604]: frame. Similarly, it is possible to define a disturbance-based
voltage coherency criterion [14]

.. .. .. (2) (5)
. . .

Instead of the entropy-based criterion (2), the performance

where
of configuration during the disturbance can be assessed
equally well based on the angle or voltage-coherency matrix

.. .. .. (6)
where is the self-entropy of the th signal while . . .
is the conditional entropy of given the th signal. In ad-

and (4)
KAMWA AND GRONDIN: PMU CONFIGURATION FOR SYSTEM DYNAMIC PERFORMANCE MEASUREMENT 387

It can be observed that all the diagonal elements of this ma- we can achieve if only PMUs are to be allocated. In other
trix are zero, meaning that the coherency of a given bus with re- words, more than busses should be metered in order to fur-
spect to itself is exactly zero. Generalizing this result to , ther reduce the approximation error.
it appears that the coherency is “large” when busses and
pertain to two distinct coherent groups and “small” when both III. SEQUENTIAL PLACEMENT ALGORITHMS
and busses are members of the same coherent group. Clearly,
A. Problem Formulation
the coherency coefficient is as good a measure of the electrical
distance separating two busses as the entropy [18], [22], [25]. The various criteria studied in Section II suggest that a re-
Therefore, as far as possible, a good PMU configuration stricted size of PMU configuration is suitable if it achieves
should avoid including too many busses from the same coherent the same information content as that obtained by monitoring
group; i.e., busses retained in should have large cross co- the full candidate set. Therefore, since the maximum amount
herency indexes . of information available for a given disturbance is , our
objective is to find a set , given the number of PMUs to be
C. Redundancy and Dominant Subspace placed , which minimizes the loss of information,
i.e., the discrepancy between the actual information measure
Instead of seeking a placement set “maximizing the informa-
and the target . This problem is formalized
tion” captured through the bus signal responses, we can look
as follows:
at the problem in a quite complementary way by asking for
a solution “minimizing the correlation” among these signals. Minimize
While still emphasizing busses incorporating original and dis-
tinctive information in their signals, this viewpoint will dis- subject to (9)
card along the way all redundant busses yielding similar in-
where is a measure of the information contained in the
formation in order to relieve congestion of the data communi-
signal response set recorded at the bus set during
cation infrastructure. Let us again consider the time-response
a disturbance . When multiple operating scenarios are consid-
signal matrix whose columns are signal responses of
ered, the signal responses are random variables, making the cost
the corresponding busses. If we have exactly (redun-
function a random variable also. In what follows, we assume
dant) columns of , which can be expressed as a linear
that a random variable can capture the stochastic nature of dif-
combination of the remaining independent columns, these
ferent operating conditions regarding different load levels and
columns together constitute an optimal configuration set ,
network topologies. For each scenario, the same set of dis-
since there is no loss of information when is replaced
turbances is considered over an observation time frame . In
by , i.e.,: . Looking at the problem
addition, let be a set containing all the scenarios considered
this way shows that selecting the appropriate configuration is
and let , , be the probability (weight) associated with
basically a rank reduction of a large matrix. In linear algebra,
scenario . Then (9) becomes
it is well known that singular value decomposition (SVD) [23],
[24] is an ideal tool for this problem, since it allows a vector Minimize
space to be split into two subspaces: one dominant , the
other subdominant , where denotes the sub- subject to (10)
space spanned by the columns of the matrix . That is, in the where
decomposition

(7)

where is a diagonal matrix consisting of the singular It should be noted that any scenario is characterized by a
values of , the subspaces and may performance measure associated with the
be used in a direct sum to reconstitute the subspace given placement . For each scenario, the performance mea-
sure is averaged (expectation operator) over the disturbances
(8)
considered in set . Also, notice that the scenarios are defined
This decomposition of subspaces is equivalent to the least- according to
squares approximation of the -column matrix by a • seasonal load levels, i.e., peak and off-peak load levels for
low-rank -column matrix , which is quite close to our different seasons of the year;
objective of configuring a reduced set of PMUs at busses in • different network topologies for every seasonal load level,
, such that the least-squares errors of the approximation of as a result of forced and scheduled outages of generators,
by is “small.” The “smallness” of the approxi- lines and transformers.
mation error is measured by the corresponding singular values So far, we have not discussed the numerical evaluation of
: if they all equal 0, the approximation error is 0 and matrix norms introduced in (2) and (3) or (8), which constitute
the PMU configuration is therefore strictly optimal. If not, the backbone of the various information metrics in (10). Several
the placement set is only optimal in a loose sense, i.e., the best choices are available, including the following:
388 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON POWER SYSTEMS, VOL. 17, NO. 2, MAY 2002

• : Frobenius norm B. Solution by “Greedy” Optimization

of the —matrix ; Let us first recall relevant properties of the above problem.
• : SVD norm of , where , the sin-
• The decision variables are 0–1 integer: a bus is either se-
gular values of are also the eigenvalues of the “infor-
lected for PMU installation or not.
mation matrix” ;
• The objective function, whether in a loss (9) or yield (11)
• : Gramian norm of format, is particularly nonlinear and random, due to the
. consideration of multiple scenarios and disturbances.
This last criterion offers interesting interpretations in the con- • The problem is of a very large dimension: a system
text of time-response-based PMU placement, aiming at maxi- model for operation studies may consist of 500–1000
mizing the following time-response signal matrix [16]: busses. If PMUs are to be allocated to 10% of 500 busses,
i.e., 50 metered busses, the total possible selections is
, a huge number. An exhaustive
enumeration of the solution space is therefore not an
.. .. .. appropriate technique for realistic system size.
. . .
For all these reasons, we opted not to tackle the optimization
directly but to use a so-called “greedy” algorithm [26], which
• Defining the overall response of a placement set as the builds sequentially following an incremental expansion or
sum of squares over the time-window of interest of the elimination strategy. The idea behind our approach is simple.
time-responses recorded at the corresponding busses, it is For the expansion strategy, which relies on a yield type objective
evident that the diagonal elements of account for function, we assumed a set consisting of busses at iteration
the overall response of the sensors. Since this Gramian is . The next bus to be added to the set is the one that produces the
a positive semidefinite matrix, its determinant increases greatest immediate increase in the value of the objective func-
with its diagonal elements. tion, provided such a bus exists. Moreover, once a bus is selected
• The off-diagonal elements of account for the cor- for PMU installation, it is kept in the set throughout the al-
relation among the sensor responses. The determinant of a gorithm. For the elimination process, which relies on a cost-type
positive-semidefinite matrix decreases with large-in-mag- objective function, we started from the candidate set . Then,
nitude off-diagonal elements. at iteration , the bus to be discarded for PMU installation is
• The exponent scales the units appropriately such the one that produces the least immediate decrease in the value
that the criterion is measured in the same physical units as of the objective function. The process is iterated until
the responses constituting the columns of . busses have been eliminated, resulting in a set of busses re-
tained. We will now explain the major steps of the two “greedy”
The cost function in (9) assumes a placement process that
optimization algorithms in more detail.
starts with a large set of possible PMU locations and then re-
duces it to a minimal set according to some rigorous cost-func-
tion minimization procedure. However, it is possible and some- C. Yield Maximization Through Sequential Addition
times more effective to take a dual approach to the problem: Let us assume that, for each scenario and each distur-
assume a small (or empty) initial set of busses equipped with bance , a set of time-responses with the number of
PMUs and extend the set up to a pre-specified size . Naturally, candidate busses in set is obtained by simulating the con-
for the solution to be attractive, the number of busses equipped tingencies in a stability program such as PTI’s PSS/E. Let us
with PMUs should ultimately be much smaller than the number also assume that these responses are sampled (regularly or not)
of system nodes. over a time-grid of points, from time 0 to s, including
Remember that denotes the set of busses samples in the pre-fault period that are discarded from the co-
to be equipped with PMUs. The yield of any tentative config- herency evaluation. The greedy maximization of the yield pro-
uration can then be easily assessed from the quantity of ceeds as follows.
information associated with a given disturbance. The 1) Initialization Phase 1: Define the set of candidate busses
dual-objective function [with respect to (9)] consists therefore in from which to choose the new PMU installations:
finding a set which maximizes the actual information mea- . Then select the number
sure of the configuration given the number of PMUs of PMUs to be placed in the grid.
to be placed. The dual approach is formalized as follows: 2) Initialization Phase 2: Let us assume the existence of
an initial set of busses where we already have allo-
Minimize cated mandatory PMUs:
. If there is no mandatory PMU allocated beforehand,
subject to (11)
and .
3) Define a new set of candidates busses excluding any
where is an upper bound on the number of PMUs al- busses where a PMU is already installed
lowed in the grid, while measures the amount of infor-
mation in the signal-response set recorded at the bus
set during a disturbance .
KAMWA AND GRONDIN: PMU CONFIGURATION FOR SYSTEM DYNAMIC PERFORMANCE MEASUREMENT 389

4) Do the following while 3) Do the following while

1) Compute the SVD of and then its information 1) Compute the SVD of and then its information
content according to the Gramian norm content according to the Gramian

2) For
2) For
1) Build a new PMU configuration set ex-
1) Build a signal matrix cluding the th bus:
2) Compute the SVD of and then its infor-
mation content according to its Gramian
whose first -columns are associated with
the busses already equipped with a PMU
and whose last column consists of the th bus
candidate for a PMU. 3) Compute the loss function for the tentative
2) Compute the SVD of and then its infor- set:
mation content according to its Gramian
3) Sort the loss function values . The bus to
be eliminated for the next PMU placement round is
the one minimizing the information loss from
to , i.e., corresponding to the smallest value of
3) Compute the yield function for the tentative
set: .
3) Sort the yield function values . The bus
retained for the next PMU placement is the one that
maximizes the information improvement from 4) The number of candidate busses for the next step
to , i.e., corresponding to the highest value of is then reduced by 1 while the
number of busses discarded for PMU installment is
increased by 1 . The new candidate
set now excludes the bus .
4) The busses not discarded in the above process are
4) The number of candidate busses for the next step is
those where PMUs should be placed. They are contained
then reduced by 1 while the number
in the set , which is therefore a solution to the
of busses to which a PMU has been allocated is
problem of optimal configuration of PMUs.
increased by 1 . Now define a new
candidate set, which excludes the bus , as well E. Simple Practical Illustration
as a new set of busses equipped with PMU
As a quick check of the above algorithms, we can consider
and the problem of placing PMUs on the 735-kV transmission net-
work of Hydro-Québec’s power system schematized in Fig. 1.
The restriction to the UHV network is necessary to simplify the
5) The busses where PMUs were placed in step 4 are
map and help the reader follow the basic steps of the placement
contained in the set : this is the solution to the problem
procedures.
of optimal configuration of PMUs.
With only 29 substations at 735 kV, our objective will be
roughly to place 10–20 PMUs at selected busses. We consid-
D. Loss Minimization Through Sequential Elimination
ered two equally probable scenarios [ in (10)]: a
Let us assume again that, for each scenario and each strong grid, corresponding to the 1996 winter peak load (36 677
disturbance , a set of time-responses, with the mW generation), and a summer grid (25 000 mW generation),
number of candidate busses in the set , is available. The with the network weakened by the outage of two 735-kV lines
greedy minimization of the information loss proceeds as fol- in the eastern and western corridors. Twelve contingencies were
lows. selected, among those most frequently encountered in operation
1) Initialization Phase 1: Define the set of candidate studies [12], essentially short-circuit faults, cleared in six cycles
busses from which to choose new PMU installations: and followed in a few cases by a single- or double-line outage.
. Then select the All the disturbances for each of these scenarios are simulated
number of PMUs to be placed in the grid. in Hydro-Québec’s stability program (ST600) and
2) Initialization Phase 2: Define the number of busses to be time-responses are recorded, representing signal-response sig-
eliminated, and let . natures of the candidate busses for PMU installation. These re-
390
Fig. 1. Overview of the Hydro-Québec bulk transmission system.
sponses are sampled unevenly (higher sampling rate just after
the fault) over a 20-s time lapse. In implementing the perfor-
mance indexes of the placement algorithms, the coherency cri-
terion in conjunction with the Gramian norm will be adopted
as the measure of the information content of a given PMU con-
figuration. However, this measure is first computed separately
using the angle and voltage stability-based coherency criteria in
(6) and (7). Then, the geometric mean of the two results is taken
as a combined information measure accounting simultaneously
for angle and voltage stability phenomena.
Table I illustrates the internal behavior of the placement pro-
cedures at the first steps of addition and elimination. For the
addition, the initial set defined in the second step of the al-
gorithm (see Section III-C) consists of the LG2 and Churchill
busses, associated with the two largest plants in the network:
, where the numbering of the busses is from
Hydro-Québec’s System Operation Department.
The incremental yield is computed according to (11) while
the loss is derived from (9). The busses are ranked according
to the incremental yield or loss resulting from adding them to
or discarding them from the PMU bus set. The results of these
objective function computations are normalized to one for the
largest yield and smallest loss, respectively, only to simplify the
readings. With these conventions, the bus with a yield equal to 1
should be retained in a sequential addition process while the bus
with a unity loss will be discarded in a sequential elimination.
These two busses can be found at the bottom of Table I, i.e., the
next bus for addition is “724” (LG4) while the next candidate
for elimination is “701” (Boucherville). Interestingly, while the
first bus for addition is not ambiguous (the second best ranked
for addition having about 18% less yield), the elimination pro-
cedure ends with the two first-ranked busses separated by less
than 3% loss, which is quite natural considering that, at this ini-
tial stage, the set of 29 candidate busses is still highly redundant.
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON POWER SYSTEMS, VOL. 17, NO. 2, MAY 2002
TABLE I
NORMALIZED YIELD AND LOSS VALUES AT THE FIRST ATTEMPT TO ADD OR
ELIMINATE, RESPECTIVELY, A SINGLE BUS
When comparing the selected busses with those ranked worst
(last versus first entry of Table I), the discrepancy is in the range
of 1:10 for elimination and 1:20 for addition, which means that
a purely random choice is rather ineffective from the point of
view of strategic information. Notice too that in the sequential
addition scheme the two busses least likely for the next selection
is “720” (Radisson) and “710” (Montagnais). The reason for this
is that they are quite close to the LG2 and Churchill generating
plants, respectively, which are already present in the PMU bus
set: .
Fig. 2 presents the location of the 19 first busses selected
for PMUs by the sequential addition algorithm. After the first
two have been arbitrarily assigned, the next is LG4, which is a
large plant strategically located center-north of the James Bay
area. Then the sitting process jumps to the far south, close to the
Unites States border and the load center (Montreal area), which
is quite reasonable. The 5th, 6th, 7th, and 8th PMU sites are
substations that occupy critical locations in their respective cor-
ridors. Considering that a good configuration should not only
preserve the information (performance issue) but also not be
myopic about regional events, i.e., there should not be regional
“black holes” deprived of PMUs, at least 11 PMUs are needed
in Fig. 2 to achieve a satisfactory configuration, with at least
a single PMU in each major load or generation area. However,
additional requirements for statistical redundancy, or topolog-
ical observability and reliability may make it necessary to use
more PMUs than required by dynamic performance only. These
considerations will be further developed in Section IV, using a
well-defined multiarea network.
IV. IMPROVEMENTS AND VALIDATION ON A 9-AREA NETWORK
A. Additional Constraints on PMU Placement
So far, we have focused on the dynamic performance as-
pect of placement, irrespective of the cost for instance, the only
requirement being that the number of PMUs should equal a
pre-specified number. If the required investment for installing
KAMWA AND GRONDIN: PMU CONFIGURATION FOR SYSTEM DYNAMIC PERFORMANCE MEASUREMENT
Fig. 2. Geographical spread of 19 PMUs placed by sequential addition. A
bus number (in bold) indicates its selection rank (the first two were arbitrarily
assigned).
and operating a PMU at a site is assumed to be , the
overall cost of a given solution is simply
We should therefore be seeking a configuration that maxi-
mizes the yield of the PMU set, albeit not at any cost, i.e., under
the constraint that the overall installation cost of the selected
configuration be below a given threshold
Maximize
subject to (12)
Although economics is important, especially for today’s
deregulated utilities, this aspect has been put aside for future
research, chiefly because deriving the above function
for all substations in a large grid is a sizeable task. However,
the algorithms proposed in this paper are well prepared for
taking into account basic regional constraints. Hence, if it is
possible beforehand to specify which busses absolutely must
be equipped with PMUs in order to fulfill regional metering
requirements, these busses can be included in the initial set
of busses: , defined
in the second step of the sequential addition process (see
Section III-C). Similarly, for the sequential elimination pro-
cedure, the set of mandatory busses should be discarded from
the candidate set
defined in the first step of the corresponding algorithm (see
Section III-D).
One set of busses that it makes sense to monitor in a context
where regional behavior is of concern is the set of tie-line
busses. Basically, this monitoring idea is quite similar to the
391
automatic control area selection algorithm (ACASA) of [25],
which also aims at grouping busses in coherent islands and
identifying the links between these groups as weak ties, moni-
toring of which is mandatory for voltage-collapse prevention.
These weak inter-ties consist of high-impedance branches (e.g.,
long transmission lines), which are therefore limited in their
reactive power transfer capability. For instance, applying fuzzy
clustering techniques to a large number of response signals
to small and large disturbances, it was possible to identify
about nine areas in the entire 1000-bus Hydro-Québec grid
(Fig. 1) that were interlinked by a number of 315- and 735-kV
lines [12], [27]. However, to study the impact of incorporating
tie-line constraints into the placement process without plunging
into the heavy process of a disturbance-based coherency
analysis [17]–[19], we built from scratch a simple network
whose various electrical areas and inter-ties are intrinsically
well defined, so that they can be mapped to the corresponding
geographical areas without any ambiguity.
B. System Description
The test system discussed here was fundamentally aimed to
illustrate dynamic interactions in multiarea power systems. It
consists of two relatively small-size cells of six or nine busses
replicated a number of times with different dynamic data and
interconnected using tie-lines of different power transfer capa-
bility. The overall network has 67 busses, 79 branches, and 23
machines modeled in detail (with speed and voltage regulators,
in addition to a few power system stabilizers) and about 7000
mW of nonlinear loads spread over nine geographical areas
closely overlapping the underlying electrically coherent areas.
Fig. 3 illustrates the topology of this network.
The numbers of the tie-lines between the different areas are
shown along with the active/reactive power across them in the
basic scenario. In addition, the number of busses in each area
is indicated in the circle defining the area, together with the
area active/reactive generation and load. Three scenarios were
selected from a previous study [12]:
1) the base system with small inter-area power flows, as
shown in Fig. 3;
2) the base system with a forced 180-mW power flow from
areas 7 to 2;
3) the base system with a forced 180-mW power flow from
areas 7 to 8.
Moreover, two disturbances were considered in each area for a
total of 18. Sample responses are shown in Fig. 4, corresponding
to a fault on the border of areas 8 and 9, resulting in the outage
of one of the tie-lines.
C. Placement Results on the Test System
Since sequential addition proceeds incrementally from an
empty PMU set to a larger one, it is fundamentally more com-
putationally efficient than an elimination procedure when only
a few PMUs are to be placed (as is usually the case) in a large
network. For this reason, sequential addition will be our choice
in the sequel. Furthermore, a given PMU configuration will be
assessed using a coherency-based information measure with
the Gramian determinant as matrix norm and the geometric
392
Fig. 3. Topology of a 9-area artificial test system.
Fig. 4. Sample bus responses to a typical disturbance: bus angle and frequency
deviations are obtained by subtracting their respective overall mean response
averaged over the 67 busses.
mean of the voltage and angle stability-based information
measures as yield function. The following two approaches will
be compared:
1) direct placement of 20 PMUs without any constraint;
2) placement of the same number of PMUs under tie-line
constraints.
Fig. 5 illustrates the cumulative information gained about the
system during the addition process. With no constraints, the
yield improves only slowly after the first ten PMUs are allo-
cated. Above 25 PMUs, the improvement rate becomes nearly
zero. It seems reasonable therefore to conclude that, if eco-
nomics is not an issue, a good configuration should consist of at
least ten and at most 25 PMUs.
More information about the placement results are given in
Fig. 6. On this more detailed topological sketch of the test net-
work, 16 of the busses marked with a bullet are border busses.
The four remaining “bulleted” busses are the results of the con-
strained placement. Furthermore, the numbers in roman, ad-
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON POWER SYSTEMS, VOL. 17, NO. 2, MAY 2002
Fig. 5. Cumulative information during sequential addition. For the constrained
case, the following natural order is assumed when adding the 16 intertie-busses:
f2 6 23 26 27 33 37 46 47 53 56 57 50 68 40 78g.
Fig. 6. Placement results of 20 PMUs in the 67-bus test network. Bulleted
are placement results under 16 intertie-bus constraints, while numbered busses
resulted from an unconstrained placement.
jacent to the busses, represent their selection rank during the
unconstrained sequential placement of 1–20 PMUs. It is inter-
esting to see the good geographical spread of the latter config-
uration where the first nine PMUs are allocated (as expected
intuitively) in areas 1–9. After this point, it is no longer easy
for a human being to heuristically place additional devices, al-
though the algorithm continues to select suitable locations that
further improve the dynamic information content of the signal
responses recorded by the PMUs.
The constrained solution turns out to be qualitatively very
different from the unconstrained one, with for instance, a cu-
KAMWA AND GRONDIN: PMU CONFIGURATION FOR SYSTEM DYNAMIC PERFORMANCE MEASUREMENT
mulative information more than two time bigger for a realistic
16-PMU scenario (see Fig. 5)
Consequently, the constrained solution is in this example sig-
nificantly less informative than the unconstrained, globally op-
timal solution: this is yet another case where regional require-
ments may act against global goals. But we believe that global
configuration without meaningful regional constraints is at risks
of working well on network-wide disturbances while being my-
opic during local disturbances because of information black-
holes created by the lack of PMUs close to, or inside, the faulted
areas.
V. CONCLUSIONS
The paper describes the development of two new solutions to
the optimal PMU placement problem, under the assumption that
the installation of PMUs is chiefly motivated by wide-area mon-
itoring and control of large disturbances affecting the normal
operation of the interconnected system. The performance index
maximized during the configuration of a minimal set of PMUs
is consequently the amount of information contained in their
time-response signals under all plausible contingencies and re-
alistic operating scenarios. The yield of a configuration is as-
sessed on the basis of a suitable electrical distance measure
(such as the statistical average of the entropy or coherency rep-
resenting the signatures of the candidate bus set,) which has the
property of maximizing the overall sensor responses while min-
imizing their time-space cross correlation. The most computa-
tionally effective scheme studied turns out to be a “greedy” ex-
pansion procedure consisting in sequentially adding a single bus
to the set of busses already assigned for PMU installation, with
the selected bus at each iteration being the one that maximizes
the incremental yield of information.
An initial validation on Hydro-Québec’s 735-kV transmis-
sion grid provides interesting insights about the proposed place-
ment algorithms, notably the good geographical diversity of the
resulting configurations. However, it is found that regional con-
straints are necessary on the placement to avoid information
black-holes, i.e., geographical islands deprived of PMUs. In a
large multiarea system, the simplest form of a constrained op-
timal PMU placement consisted in making the inclusion of all
inter-tie busses located at the boundaries of electrically coherent
areas mandatory, although this approach has the pitfall of re-
quiring prior coherency analysis of the network. Once these
pre-selected busses are assigned to the PMU set, expansion of
the latter is straightforward using the proposed sequential ad-
dition scheme. Comparative assessment on a 9-area/67-bus/23-
machine test system pointed to the fact that, while a weak-
boundary-constrained solution is, by its very construction, less
“myopic” about local events, it is about 37% less “informa-
tive” about system-wide phenomena, thus leaving an interesting
tradeoff for the designer to deal with.
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Innocent Kamwa (S’83–M’88–SM’98) received the B.Eng. and Ph.D. degrees
in electrical engineering from Laval University, PQ, Canada, in 1984 and 1988,
respectively.
Since 1988, he has been with the Hydro-Québec Research Institute/IREQ,
Varennes, PQ, Canada. Currently, he is a Senior Researcher in the Power System
Analysis, Operation, and Control Department. He is also an Associate Professor
of Electrical Engineering at Laval University.
Dr. Kamwa is a Registered Professional Engineer.
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON POWER SYSTEMS, VOL. 17, NO. 2, MAY 2002
Robert Grondin (S’77–M’80–SM’99) received the B.A.Sc. degree in electrical
engineering from the University of Sherbrooke, PQ, Canada, in 1976, and the
M.Sc. degree from INRS Energie, Varennes, PQ, in 1979.
He joined the Hydro-Québec Research Institute/IREQ, Varennes, where he
is involved in power system monitoring, modeling, and identification and in
the development of real-time computer-based systems applied to power system
control and protection.
Mr. Grondin is a member of CIGRÉ, and is a Registered Professional Engi-
neer in the province of Québec.