Optimal µPMU Placement Considering Node Importance and Multiple Deployed Monitoring Devices in Distribution Networks

The placement of micro phasor measurement units in an active distribution network can improve the monitoring performance of the system. However, the price and placement cost of micro phasor measurement units are high, so existing research mostly focuses on solving the problem of achieving global observability with the minimum number of micro phasor measurement units. However, the problems of frequent topology change in the distribution network and the increase in the number of faults that will be caused by the high proportion of distributed energy resources connected to the system may lead to the above placement scheme losing the observability of the system. The balance of maintaining the number of micro phasor measurement units placed while ensuring the monitoring stability of the system remains a crucial challenge. To address this issue, a micro phasor measurement unit placement method that considers the observability of multiple monitoring devices and node importance is proposed in this paper, which, on the one hand, fully considers the impact of the observability of existing monitoring devices on the micro phasor measurement units placement scheme and reduces the number of micro phasor measurement units that are used to achieve global observability, and, on the other hand, gives priority to placing the micro phasor measurement units at important nodes in the distribution network that are closely related to observation stability, improving the observation performance of the system. The superiority of the proposed μPMU method is verified in standard systems such as IEEE-33, IEEE-34, and P&G69, in which the number of required μPMUs is reduced by 20%, and the observation performance of the system is improved by 30% in special cases.