Abstract
Phasor measurement units (PMUs) significantly benefit the operation and control of power systems. They offer precise phasor measurements with a high refresh rate. These measurements are utilized for wide area measurement system (WAMS) to improve situational awareness and enhance the control infrastructure. In spite of these advantages, the industry has been slow to adopt PMU technology, largely due to the cost of PMUs and the communication infrastructure. However, judicious selection of PMU locations, through optimal placement of PMUs (OPP) enables the minimization of installation cost. There have been several approaches to solve the OPP; most of these approaches assume that the minimum number of PMUs achieves the minimum cost or consider the cost of PMUs without considering the communication infrastructure. This paper presents an OPP approach that considers both the communication infrastructure and the installation cost of PMUs. The proposed approach uses multi-stage installation where each stage is dependent on the cost set by the utility and not the number of PMUs. Higher priority buses can be chosen under the proposed approach. An opposition-based elitist binary genetic algorithm (O-BEBGA) is used to solve the OPP. The proposed approach is tested on the IEEE 14-bus, IEEE RTS and IEEE 30-bus test systems.