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Published in IET Generation, Transmission & Distribution
Received on 17th August 2009
Revised on 25th July 2010
doi: 10.1049/iet-gtd.2009.0709

ISSN 1751-8687

Multi-criteria decision-making approach for multi-

stage optimal placement of phasor measurement units
R. Sodhi S.C. Srivastava S.N. Singh
Department of Electrical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, Kanpur 208016, India
E-mail: rsodhi@iitk.ac.in

Abstract: An important step in the development of synchrophasor-based wide area monitoring and control system is to optimally
place the phasor measurement units (PMUs) in the network. Optimal number of PMUs, to fully observe the power system
network, may be large. Owing to their relatively high cost, utilities may like to install these devices in stages. A technique is
proposed here for placing the PMUs in multiple stages over a given time period that ensures complete power system
observability even under a branch outage or a PMU failure. The proposed scheme is based on integer linear programming
(ILP) and a multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) approach. The ILP is used to obtain the optimal PMU locations in the
system to completely observe the system and, subsequently, the MCDM model is developed to prioritise these PMU
locations. Three indices are proposed to develop the MCDM model, viz. bus observability index, voltage control area
observability index and tie-line oscillation observability index. Finally, the PMU placement is carried out in stages based on
the ranking of these optimal locations. The proposed method is applied on three test systems – IEEE 14-bus system, New
England 39-bus system and Northern Regional Power Grid 246-bus Indian system.

1 Introduction programming to find the PMU locations. Chakrabarti and

Synchrophasor-based wide area monitoring and control
systems (WAMCS) are being popularly deployed by electric
power utilities [1]. The major advantages of the WAMCS
include dynamic wide area measurements with higher
accuracy and faster rate. The time synchronised voltage and
current phasors are estimated through phasor measurement
units (PMUs) located in the field, facilitating systems wide
monitoring and control. For utilising the synchrophasor
technology in an optimal manner, the first and the foremost
task is to determine a set of suitable locations in the system
where the PMUs can be installed, incurring minimum cost
while making the system observable. This problem has
been termed as the optimal PMU placement (OPP) problem
in the literature.
The OPP problem was first formulated by Baldwin et al.
[2], using graph – theoretic approach in order to ensure the
system topological observability. The method utilised depth
first search algorithm to find an initial set for PMU
placement, which was further optimised by using simulated
annealing technique. Milǒsević and Begovic [3] used a
genetic algorithm-based method to place a minimal set of
PMUs, considering two conflicting objectives, viz.
minimisation of number of PMUs and maximisation of the
measurement redundancy. An integer linear programming
(ILP)-based formulation was suggested by Xu and Abur [4]
for placing PMUs in the network to make it fully
observable. Rakpenthai et al. [5] used the condition number
of the normalised measurement matrix as a criterion for
selecting candidate solutions, along with binary integer
Kyriakides [6] suggested a binary search method to find out
minimum number of PMUs to ensure complete
observability of the power system.
PMU placement has also been carried out for some other
specific applications, such as voltage stability [7], transient
stability [8] and fault location in the network [9]. However,
a literature survey reveals that most of the OPP work has
been carried out for making the power system fully
observable with their minimal number. One apparent reason
for making the system completely observability with only
PMU measurements is that such a PMU placement will lead
to the use of linear state estimator, which is much faster
and accurate as compared to the conventional supervisory
control and data acquisition-based non-linear state
estimators [10].
Most of the available OPP techniques, in the literature,
concentrate only on finding the optimal number and
locations of the PMUs in a power system network.
However, in a large practical system, the number of PMUs,
to fully observe the system, may be very large. The high
capital cost associated with the PMU installation
corroborates the need of installing the PMUs in multiple
stages. To the best of authors’ knowledge, the multi-stage
PMU placement has been addressed by only Nuqui and
Phadke [11] and Dua et al. [12] so far. The concept of
depth of unobservability has been used in [11] to phase out
the PMU placement. This method deals with the complete
enumeration of spanning tress of the power system network
graph, whereas an ILP-based algorithm has been devised
for optimal multi-stage scheduling of PMUs in [12]. The

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objective of the OPP method, suggested by Dua et al. [12], is
to achieve complete observability of the system over a time
span, and therefore the overall PMU placement result, after
the completion of the last stage of the PMU placement,
comes out to be identical to that obtained by placing the
PMUs together in a single stage using the ILP method,
ensuring the full-system observability.
In this work, a methodology is suggested first for
determining the optimal number and locations of PMUs
ensuring complete observability of the system and,
subsequently, placing these PMUs in a phased manner
utilising a multi-criteria approach, based on certain criteria
like tie-line oscillation observability and voltage control
area observability. The main contribution of this work is the
development of the multi-criteria framework to prioritise
different optimal PMU locations and, subsequently, using it
to install PMUs in stages according to their relative ranking.
In the first step of the proposed method, an ILP-based
PMU placement method is carried out with the objective of
finding minimum number of PMUs, required for rendering
the complete system observability. The PMU placement
considers contingency cases pertaining to single PMU
outage and single branch outage. Subsequently, a multi-
criteria decision-making (MCDM) [13] model is utilised for
selecting a subset of PMUs to be installed in stages, out of
the total optimal PMUs set obtained through the ILP. The
methodology is tested on three test systems, viz. IEEE 14-
bus system, New England (NE) 39-bus system and 246-bus
Northern Region Power Grid (NRPG) Indian system to
demonstrate its effectiveness.
2 Identifying optimal PMU locations
A minimal set of PMU locations can be obtained, for a given
network topology, to ensure system observability. However,
loss of a transmission line or a PMU may result into
unobservability of some of the buses in the power system
network. To determine a robust metering scheme and,
thereby, to enhance the reliability of the system monitoring,
each node should be observed through at least two PMUs.
This constraint can be incorporated in the basic ILP-based
PMU placement method suggested in [4] as follows. To
ensure the system’s complete observability with minimum
number of PMUs, following rules and assumptions have
been applied in this work:
1. It is assumed that the PMUs provide two types of
measurements, viz. the voltage phasors and the outgoing
line current phasor measurements.
2. If voltage phasor and current phasor at one end of a branch
are known, voltage phasor at the other end of the branch can
be calculated using Ohm’s law.
3. Each substation is represented by a single ‘node/bus’.
However, a substation might have a double busbar
arrangement involving double or one and a half breaker
scheme. It is assumed that a single PMU will be used to
monitor voltage at the two busbars and also to monitor
currents in all the outgoing feeders emanating from the
substation.
4. The network parameters, that is, R, L, X, C and the system
topology are assumed to be known.
5. In this study, cost of all the PMUs is assumed to be same.
It is recognised that each of the PMUs may have different
number of channels and their costs may vary accordingly.
The proposed method, however, is general and can be used
to accommodate different cost of the PMUs.
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With the above-stated assumptions, the following notations
have been used in this work:
2.1 Parameters
N – number of buses in the system
ci – cost of installing a PMU at bus i
aij – ijth entry of a connectivity matrix A defined as

1, if i and j are directly connected
aij =
0, otherwise
2.2 Decision variable
ui ¼ 1 if PMU is placed over bus i, 0 otherwise
U – vector containing the binary decision variables, ui
The ILP problem can be formulated as

N
minimise ci ui (1)
i=1
subject to AU ≥ 2 (2)
ui = (0/1) ∀i (3)
The objective function (1) is to minimise the total cost of
PMU installation. In this study, cost of all the PMUs is
assumed to be same. However, the proposed method can be
used to accommodate different PMU costs by changing the
value of ci in (1). Constraints (2) ensure that each bus in the
network is observed by at least two PMUs. For the purpose
of illustration, the above ILP formulation can be explained
with the help of a simple 5-bus system as shown in Fig. 1.
In the formulation, U contains five binary decision
variables. The constraint at each bus is formulated to ensure
that each bus is connected to two PMUs. To illustrate the
constraints, consider the bus-2, connected to buses 1, 3 and
5. The bus-2 will be made observable by at least two PMUs if
f2 : u2 + u1 + u3 + u5 ≥ 2 (4)
The above formulation of the PMU placement differs from [4]
in the sense that right-hand side of the constraint (2) is two
instead of one. This will ensure that each bus is observed
by a minimum of two PMUs and will ascertain that a PMU
outage or failure of a communication link does not lead to
loss of observability. In [4], each bus is observed by at least
one PMU, which may result in unobservability of some of
the buses in case of a PMU or transmission line outage, as
illustrated further.
Fig. 1 Network diagram of a 5-bus sample system
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Assuming cost of PMU installation at each node as 1 p.u.,
the ILP algorithm for the sample system of Fig. 1 can be
formulated as

5 process and determine criteria value for each alternative.
minimise uj
j=1
 following equation
s.t. fj : uj + uIj ≥ 2; j = 1, 2, . . . , 5
uj = (0/1); j = 1, 2, . . . , 5
where Ij is the set of all the buses directly connected to the bus
j. The solution of the above ILP, using CPLEX software [14],
is obtained as U∗ ¼ {2, 4, 5}. The solution of the ILP
problem, using [4] is U∗ ¼ {2, 5}. It is clear, from Fig. 1,
that using the optimal PMU placement solution as U∗ ¼ {2,
5}, bus-4 becomes unobservable in the event of failure of
PMU at bus-5 or line 4 – 5 outage, whereas PMU placement
solution U∗ ¼ {2, 4, 5} results in complete system
observability even under such contingency cases.
It must be noted that if a bus is observed by at least two
PMUs, then a line outage will not affect the complete
observability of the network. Thus, considering a PMU
outage in optimal PMU placement problem also takes care
of N 2 1 contingency cases.
3 Proposed multi-stage PMU placement
approach
Let the ILP algorithm (in Section 2) results in total P number
of optimal PMU locations, which are to be placed in S stages.
Let the number of PMUs to be placed in stage-i be ni such that
SSi¼1ni ¼ P. So, the total number of available alternatives, L,
for selecting a subset from optimal PMU locations, P, in the
first stage will be
P!
L1 =
n1 ! × (P − n1 )!
Similarly, available alternatives for placing the n2 PMUs in
the second stage becomes
(P − n1 )!
L2 =
n2 ! × (P − n1 − n2 )!
The number of alternatives available for PMU placement in
successive stages keep on reducing and the total number of
available options can be numerous in case of a large power
system. In order to obtain the best alternative, out of a large
number of available options, the problem can involve a
number of objectives, which have to be addressed
simultaneously. Thus, the multi-stage optimal PMU
installation becomes a MCDM problem. The decision of
selecting a suitable subset of optimal PMU locations, in each
stage, can involve addressing many important factors such as
observing the tie-line oscillations, voltage control areas,
critical corridors and so on. An MCDM model is adopted for
this purpose as described below.
Several methods are available in the literature for MCDM.
A multi-attribute utility theory (MAUT) [15] approach has
been used in this study as it is quite simple and an intuitive
approach to the decision making. Additionally, it allows the
decision maker to allocate relative weights to various
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criteria under consideration. The MAUT approach can be
summarised in the following steps:
1. Identify various criteria to be used in the evaluation
2. Determine weights for different criteria.
3. Calculate the utility value for each alternative using the

k
UVi = wj vij ; i = 1, 2, . . . , P (7)
j=1
where UVi is the utility value of alternative i, wj represents the
weight assigned to criterion j, vij is the value associated with
alternative i for criterion j, k is the total number of criteria and
P is the total number of alternatives available. Various steps
of MAUT, used in this study for multi-stage PMU
placement, are given in the following subsection.
3.1 PMU selection criteria
In the present work, superiority of a particular PMU location
has been judged based upon three criteria. These include bus
voltage observability, voltage control area observability and
tie-line oscillations observability. To incorporate these three
criteria in the MCDM model, three respective indices have
been defined as given below.
3.1.1 Bus voltage observability index (BOI): BOI for a
PMU bus p is defined as the number of buses directly
connected to the PMU bus. The BOI at a PMU bus p, in an
N-bus system, is, therefore, expressed as

N
BOIp = Cpj (8)
j=1
j=p
(5)

1, if p and j are directly connected
where Cpj =
0, otherwise
To enhance the observability of the power system with phasor
measurements, a bus having maximum connectivity with
(6)
other buses becomes a preferred choice for the PMU
placement.
3.1.2 Voltage control area observability index (VOI):
In initial stages, PMUs should be uniformly distributed in the
system. This can be ensured by selecting the PMU locations
that are electrically far apart. This would also assist in
identifying different voltage control areas in the power
system [16] along with uniform distribution of PMUs in
each stage. Electrical distance between two nodes i and j is
calculated as follows:
1. Calculate Newton– Raphson load flow Jacobian J and,
hence, obtain the sub-matrix J4 , where J4 ¼ [∂Q/∂V ].
2. Invert J4 . Say B ¼ [∂Q/∂V ]21 ¼ J214 . The elements of B
are written as bij ¼ (∂Vi/∂Qj).
3. Obtain attenuation matrix aij , between nodes i and j, as
aij ¼ bij/bjj .
4. Calculate the electrical distance between nodes i and j as
Dij ¼ Dji ¼ 2log10(aij × aji).
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Once electrical distances between every pair of nodes are
calculated, voltage control area observability index (VOI)
for a PMU bus-p can be defined as
 2. In Fig. 2b, a PMU is to be placed at tie-line bus m, whereas
VOIp = Dpj , p [ PMU buses
j[ PMU buses
Dpp ¼ 0, as electrical distance at the same bus will be zero.
3.1.3 Tie-line oscillation observability index (TOI): It
is desirable to monitor the tie-line buses, because the power
oscillations in large systems are generally observed through
the dynamic changes in the tie-line power flows and phase
angle difference at its two ends [10]. A good PMU
placement strategy should try to make as many tie-lines
observable as possible in every stage of the PMU
placement. Since PMUs, as given in Section 2, are placed
in such a way that each bus is observed by at least two
PMUs, six different cases might arise as depicted in
Figs. 2a – e. The heuristic approach, used to calculate TOI,
in each of these cases is discussed below.
1. Fig. 2a depicts the case when both the tie-line buses m and
n are in the list of optimal PMU locations (as obtained in
Fig. 2 Different cases for the calculation of tie-line observability
index
a Both tie-line buses are equipped with PMUs
b One tie-line bus is equipped with PMU
c None of the tie-line buses is equipped with PMU
d One tie-line bus is neighbour of another tie-line bus
e Two tie-line buses have a common neighbouring bus
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Section 2). Since both PMUs are to be placed at tie-line
buses over a period of time, both these locations are of
equal importance and can be assigned with the same value
of the tie-line index, say TOIm ¼ TOIn ¼ 1.
(9)
tie-line bus n can be observed by either of the PMUs, placed
at bus m and bus l. Hence, it becomes important to place PMU
at bus m to observe the tie-line n at least from one end during
the initial stages. Therefore TOIm ¼ 1.5 and TOIl ¼ 0.5.
3. Fig. 2c shows a case when both the tie-line buses m and n are
not in the list of optimal PMU placement and will be observed
through PMUs to be placed at buses k and l. Since the tie-line
m 2 n is going to be observed only via neighbouring PMUs
to be placed at buses k and l, an early observability of the tie-
line can be assured by assigning highest index value to the
respective PMU buses as TOIk ¼ TOIl ¼ 2.0.
4. Fig. 2d depicts a possible situation, where both the tie-line
buses m and n are equipped with PMUs, and there is another
tie-line m ′ 2 n ′ , in which bus m ′ is equipped with a PMU and
its other corresponding tie-line bus n ′ is not in the list of
optimal PMU locations. The network topology is such that
bus n is a neighbouring bus of bus-n ′ . It is basically a
simultaneous occurrence of case (1) at tie-line m 2 n and of
case (2) at tie-line m ′ 2 n ′ . In such cases, TOIm ¼ 1,
TOIm ′ ¼ 1.5, TOIn ¼ 1 + 0.5 ¼ 1.5.
5. Another possible case is shown in Fig. 2e, where bus l is a
common neighbouring bus of two tie-line buses, viz. n and n ′ ,
equipped with a PMU. In such cases, TOI can be calculated as
TOIm ¼ TOIn ¼ 1.5, TOIl ¼ 0.5 + 0.5 ¼ 1.
6. If a PMU bus location i (in the optimal PMU list) is not a
tie-line bus, TOIi ¼ 0.
3.2 Weight calculation
Selection of weights, associated with each criterion, involves
a certain amount of subjectivity and this feature can be very
useful in the problem at hand. This is because there might
be some critical/pressing factors, for example, tie-line
observability, which need to be addressed with the top most
priority in a multi-staged PMU placement. Such crucial
criteria can always be assigned a highest weight in the
proposed MCDM method and, thereby, an early PMU
placement can be ensured to handle such bottlenecks. For
calculating the weights of different criteria, the principle of
analytic hierarchy process (AHP) [17] is used in this work.
A pairwise matrix is constructed using AHP, which decides
the relative importance of different criteria. The steps of the
AHP algorithm can be briefly summarised as follows:
1. Form a pairwise matrix. The values of elements in this
matrix reflect the user’s knowledge about relative
importance between every pair of criteria.
2. Calculate the maximum eigenvalue and the eigenvector of
the pairwise matrix.
3. Perform the hierarchy ranking.
Thus, according to the above algorithm, pairwise matrix for
the three criteria is formed as
⎡ ⎤
w1 /w1 w1 /w2 w1 /w3
M = ⎣ w2 /w1 w2 /w2 w2 /w3 ⎦ (10)
w3 /w1 w3 /w2 w3 /w3
where wj is the weighting coefficient of criterion j, required to
be determined. However, wj/wk , that is ratio of the weights for
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all pairs of criteria, is assumed according to their relative
importance [13]. The importance of one factor over another
can be the integer numbers on a scale of 1 – 9 as follows:

† 1 ¼ Equally important;
† 3 ¼ Moderately important over another;
† 5 ¼ Essentially important;
† 7 ¼ Very strongly important;
† 9 ¼ Extremely important.

The following equation is used to obtain the weights

denoted by wj , in (7), as

Mw = lmax w (11)

where w is the three-dimensional eigenvector associated with

the largest eigenvalue of pairwise matrix M. Elements of w
are normalised to sum to unity.

3.3 Calculating utility value

With the availability of values of the proposed indices

(calculated as described in Section 3.1) and the weights of
the three criteria (Section 3.2), the utility value of each
alternative can be calculated. The utility value is termed as
PMU location performance index (PLPI) and is calculated
as follows

3
PLPIi = wj vij ; i = 1, 2, . . . , P
j=1
where PLPI1 , PLPI2 , . . . , PLPIP are the final ranking values
of each PMU location.
3.4 Normalisation of criteria and weights
Normalisation process facilitates the relative comparison
between values of different criteria. The value of each
criterion, calculated from (8) and (9), has been normalised
to range from zero to one. In general, if c is a vector with
its ith value as ci , then the vector c can be normalised in
the range g, g + k as
k(ci − cmin )
ĉi = +g
(cmax − cmin )
where ĉ is the normalised vector, cmin and cmax are the
minimum and maximum values of the vector c,
respectively. Similarly, elements of w, the weight vector,
have been normalised to sum to unity as
wi
wi =
S3 wi
The limit in (14) extends up to 3, because the weight vector w
contains three elements in this work, corresponding to each
criterion.
In Fig. 3, the flow diagram of the proposed multi-criteria
multi-stage optimal PMU placement method is shown. The
dotted rectangles in the flow diagram demarcate the use of
ILP and MCDM model. As shown in Fig. 3, ILP is used to
solve the optimal PMU placement problem to ensure
complete system observability and MCDM is used to rank
the optimal PMU locations, taking the three proposed
Fig. 3 Flow diagram of the proposed multi-criteria multi-stage
optimal PMU placement
(12)
indices, viz. BOI, VOI and TOI into consideration. Once
the overall ranking of the optimal PMU locations is
calculated, n1 PMU locations with highest priority in the
order of their relative ranking are considered in the first
stage, then the next n2 PMUs with the next highest priority
in the second stage, and so on.
4 Simulation results
The effectiveness of the proposed method for multi-stage
optimal PMU placement has been studied on IEEE 14-bus,
NE 39-bus [18] and NRPG [19] 246-bus Indian systems.
The IEEE 14-bus system has five synchronous machines,
three of which are synchronous condensers used for reactive
(13)
power support. NE 39-bus system, having 10 generators, 19
loads and 36 transmission lines, represents a reduced model
of the NE power system. NRPG is the biggest among all
the five regional electricity boards in India. A single-line
diagram of the system is shown in Fig. 4. The NRPG
system comprises nine states and covers around 30%
geographical area and 28% population of India. A reduced
representation of the NRPG system has been considered,
(14)
which consists of 246 buses (220 kV and 400 kV only) and
376 branches (lines/transformers). Details of the results
obtained on the three test systems are discussed below.
4.1 Optimal PMU placement
The ILP is formulated for each test system using (1) – (3), as
explained in Section 2. Further, zero-injection buses, which
are analogous to the simple nodes, have a potential to
reduce the number of PMUs required for complete system
observability [12]. Therefore in the following zero-injection
buses are considered for the three test systems.

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Fig. 4 Single-line diagram of 246-bus NRPG system network [19] (400 kV and above)
† IEEE 14-bus system: {7};
† NE 39-bus system: {1, 9, 18};
† NRPG 246-bus system: {63, 75, 81, 102, 103, 104, 107,
122, 155, 180, 210, 226, 237, 241, 244}.
The ILP is solved using CPLEX solver [14]. Table 1 shows
the results of the optimal PMU placement. The results listed
in Table 1 ensure complete system observability even under
the outage of a single PMU or a transmission line in the
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system. The aim of the following study is to rank these
optimal PMU locations so that PMU installation can be
carried out in stages.
4.2 Multi-stage PMU installation
For the multi-stage optimal PMU installation, 7, 26 and 135
PMU locations, as obtained through the ILP (listed in
Table 1), are considered for IEEE 14-bus, NE 39-bus and
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Table 1 Optimal PMU locations

System Number of Optimal locations

PMUs with ILP

IEEE 14-bus 7 2, 4, 5, 6, 9, 11, 13

NE 39-bus 26 2, 3, 6, 8, 10, 12, 13, 14, 16, 17, 19, 20, 22, 23, 25, 26, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38
NRPG 246-bus 135 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 10, 11, 12, 15, 21, 23, 24, 27, 30, 31, 33, 34, 38, 40, 41, 44, 45, 47, 48, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54,
55, 56, 57, 60, 61, 62, 65, 69, 71, 73, 74, 77, 80, 84, 87, 88, 89, 91, 92, 93, 95, 96, 98, 101, 105, 106, 108,
109, 111, 113, 117, 118, 119, 120, 123, 124, 125, 126, 128, 129, 132, 133, 134, 135, 139, 140, 141, 142,
144, 145, 147, 148, 149, 151, 153, 156, 157, 158, 159, 160, 163, 167, 168, 169, 171, 172, 173, 174, 176,
177, 178, 181, 185, 187, 188, 189, 190, 191, 193, 194, 195, 197, 199, 201, 202, 203, 206, 207, 208, 213,
216, 217, 218, 219, 223, 224, 225, 228, 229, 234, 235, 236, 238, 242, 243, 246

NRPG 246-bus systems, respectively. The PMU installation
is assumed to be carried out as per the following scheme:
† 14-Bus system: in total two stages, with four PMUs in the
first stage and three PMUs in the second stage.
† 39-Bus system: in total four stages, with seven PMUs in
the first three stages and five PMUs in the last stage.
† 246-Bus system: in total five stages with 27 PMUs in each
stage.
Further, ranking of each PMU location is calculated under
two different cases: (i) using unequal weightage (UW) to each
criterion calculated using the method described in Section 3.2
and (ii) with equal weightage (EW).
For case (i), a pairwise matrix is formed, as shown in
Table 4. In this case, the tie-line observability criterion is
considered to be an extremely important factor as compared

The proposed scheme is first demonstrated on IEEE 14-bus

system. The three criteria, as proposed in Section 3, are
calculated for all the seven optimal PMU buses listed in
Table 1. The normalised BOI, calculated for each PMU bus
is listed in Table 2. The electrical distance between any two
nodes is calculated as explained in Section 3.1 and the
values are listed in Table 3. Further, VOI is calculated at
each PMU bus using (9), and the normalised values are
shown in Table 2. These criteria values are normalised in
the range of 0 – 1 using (13).
In order to calculate the TOI, IEEE 14-bus system is
decomposed into two sub-networks using an ILP
eigenvector-based approach [20]. The partitioned network is
shown in Fig. 5a. There are four tie-lines in the partitioned
network, viz. 2 – 3, 4 – 5, 10– 11 and 13– 14. TOI, as
calculated at each PMU bus, is indicated in Fig. 5a.

Table 2 Normalised selection criteria and PLPI values for IEEE

14-bus system for UW and EW

PMU bus BOI VOI TOI PLPIUW PLPIEW

2 0.667 1.0 1.0 0.9789 0.8889

4 1.0 0.1891 1.0 0.7847 0.7297
5 0.667 0 0.5 0.3777 0.3889
6 0.667 0.2991 0 0.1213 0.3219
9 0.667 0.2236 0.5 0.4371 0.4634 Fig. 5 MAUT results in IEEE 14-bus system
11 0 0.6495 1.0 0.8440 0.5498 a Calculation of tie-line observability index in IEEE 14-bus system
13 0.333 0.5093 1.0 0.8277 0.6142 b Overall PLPI value at different optimal PMU locations in IEEE 14-bus
system for weighted and unweighted case

Table 3 Normalised electrical distance in IEEE 14-bus

PMU bus 2 4 5 6 9 11 13

2 0 0.43615 0.36617 0.73893 0.75744 0.86686 0.85774

4 0.43615 0 0.14801 0.45291 0.38129 0.54247 0.5583
5 0.36617 0.14801 0 0.39474 0.44557 0.53597 0.51813
6 0.73893 0.45291 0.39474 0 0.39145 0.26702 0.16481
9 0.75744 0.38129 0.44557 0.39145 0 0.3293 0.44059
11 0.86686 0.54247 0.53597 0.26702 0.3293 0 0.392
13 0.85774 0.5583 0.51813 0.16481 0.44059 0.392 0

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Table 4 Pairwise matrix for weight calculation with preference
given to tie-line observability

BOI VOI TOI

BOI 1 1/5 1/9

VOI 5 1 1/3
TOI 9 3 1

Table 5 Multi-stage optimal PMU placement in NE 39-bus

system with UW {0.0629, 0.2654, 0.6716} and EW
Fig. 6 Impact of multi-stage PMU placement on NE 39-bus system
Ph-1 Ph-2 Ph-3 Ph-4
for unequal weightage case
UW EW UW EW UW EW UW EW

17 17 25 10 19 22 35 36 (12) is solved and the PLPIUW of each PMU location is

8 8 26 25 38 34 3 32 listed in Table 1.
6 16 12 19 31 3 14 35 Similarly in case (ii), where all the criteria are given equal
16 6 13 13 36 14 30 30 weightage, the utility values for each alternative are calculated
10 2 34 20 23 37 33 33 and are shown as PLPIEW in Table 2. The PLPI values for the
29 26 20 23 22 38 two cases are also compared in Fig. 5b. It is clear from the
2 29 37 12 32 31 results that the first priority should be given (according to
both the cases) to bus location-2 and the PMU must be
placed at bus 2 in the first stage.
to the bus connectivity. Similarly, tie-line observability was The proposed methodology is also applied on NE 39-bus
assumed to be moderately important as compared to system. The test system is decomposed into three sub-
the uniform distribution of PMUs. Accordingly, w3/w1 ¼ 9, networks using the ILP eigenvector-based multi-partitioning
w2/w1 ¼ 5 and w3/w2 ¼ 3. The pairwise matrix has algorithm [20] and has eight tie-lines as 2 – 25, 9 – 39, 5 –6,
maximum eigenvalue of 3.0291 and the corresponding right 5 – 8, 17 – 18, 27– 28, 10– 11 and 12 – 13. Table 5 lists out
eigenvector is [0.0868, 0.3662, 0.9265]. Normalising to results of the PMUs’ selection in four stages, as obtained
sum to unity, using (14), gives weights of each criterion as by the MAUT calculations using (12) for the UW and EW
[0.0629, 0.2654, 0.6716]. With these values of the weights, cases.

Table 6 Ranking of optimal PMU locations in each stage in NRPG 246-bus system with UW {0.0629, 0.2654, 0.6716} and EW

Ph-1 Ph-2 Ph-3 Ph-4 Ph-5

UW EW UW EW UW EW UW EW UW EW

34 65 177 238 224 219 11 147 124 148

65 34 188 44 195 7 15 134 47 224
80 80 156 113 197 11 24 178 87 6
245 229 199 129 246 15 33 108 93 23
48 235 172 190 108 24 101 225 228 246
235 245 157 91 27 33 57 156 144 120
229 48 163 74 40 173 206 206 142 159
118 118 213 88 120 171 98 172 145 189
69 194 84 71 185 169 96 111 117 123
10 56 191 140 216 167 89 45 119 51
242 242 141 132 234 207 111 50 151 208
133 160 201 139 207 105 45 176 52 53
61 69 187 27 159 126 50 60 148 124
158 109 54 40 217 202 176 128 77 47
56 157 21 201 105 177 73 236 6 52
109 213 238 181 126 106 223 92 23 77
44 84 169 195 125 193 60 95 149 149
71 141 167 61 202 188 128 218 153 153
132 133 113 197 203 55 51 87 135 135
62 10 129 185 106 101 236 93 2 2
174 21 190 216 189 57 147 228 4 4
173 168 181 174 193 98 92 144 5 5
178 158 91 234 225 96 208 142 12 12
171 199 74 217 219 89 95 145 30 30
168 191 88 125 55 73 218 117 31 31
194 187 140 203 123 223 53 119 38 38
160 54 139 62 7 163 134 151 41 41

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Fig. 7 Impact of multi-stage PMU placement on NRPG 246-bus
system for unequal weightage case
Fig. 6 shows the multi-stage PMU placement performance
results. Two bars in Fig. 6 correspond to the total number of
tie-line buses observed and total BOI achieved in the
respective stage. It can be noticed from Table 1 that out of
16 tie-line buses, only eight are in the list of optimal PMU
locations. Rest of the eight tie-line buses will either be
observed by the PMU placed on the other end of the tie-
line or by the PMUs placed at the neighbouring buses.
From the MAUT results, it is observed that out of the 16
tie-line buses, 12 tie-line buses are observed during the first
stage and four tie-line buses are observed during the second
stage of the PMU placement, as shown in Fig. 6. Similarly,
PMU placed in the first stage results in a total BOI value of
25. The total BOI value in subsequent stages keeps on
increasing and it has been observed that by the end of the
third stage of PMU placement, all the buses are observed.
The proposed method is also tested on the practical NRPG
246-bus Indian system. The system is decomposed into nine
subsystems, representing separate state electricity networks,
and the total number of tie-lines obtained is 28. The total
number of PMUs to be placed in the system is 135, as
obtained in Section 4.1. The PMU placement is carried out
in five stages. The multi-stage PMU placement results for
the NRPG system, as obtained through (12), are listed in
Table 6 for both the UW and EW cases.
Similar to Fig. 6, Fig. 7 depicts the total number of tie-line
buses observed and the total BOI value in each stage of PMU
placement in the NRPG 246-bus system. It can be seen from
Fig. 7 that all the tie-lines are observed by the end of the first
stage of the PMU placement itself.
The simulation results on the three test systems reveal that
the complete observability is achieved much before the last
stage of installation of PMUs and similarly, all the tie-lines
get observed well before the last stage of the PMU
placement. Since the PMU placement is robust against a
PMU and a single line outage, the total number of optimal
PMU locations is approximately 50% of the number of
buses in the system and redundant PMUs are placed
towards the last stages. It is also to be noted that there
might be other critical factors also like monitoring of the
critical corridors, critical oscillatory modes and so on,
which the utilities might like to consider while placing the
PMUs. These factors can easily be incorporated in the
proposed MCDM framework, and the priority of these
criteria can, further, be raised (if needed) by assigning
higher weights to them.
5 Conclusions
In the proposed work, a multi-stage PMU placement scheme
is developed, which combines ILP and MCDM approach.
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doi: 10.1049/iet-gtd.2009.0709
www.ietdl.org
The ILP determines a set of optimal PMU locations to
make the system completely observable even under a
branch outage or a PMU failure. The MCDM employs
utility theory to find weights to the three criteria considered
for prioritising the optimal PMU locations. The criteria,
used in the present work, include tie-line oscillations
observability, voltage control area observability and bus
voltage observability. Based on these criteria, three indices
are proposed, viz. BOI, VOI and TOI. Finally, the proposed
indices are used in the MCDM process for ranking the
optimal PMU locations and, thereby, selecting the PMU
locations in each stage.
The proposed scheme is demonstrated on three systems.
The simulation results show that the proposed method can
benefit utilities in deciding multi-stage PMU installations as
it facilitates in gaining a maximum advantage from a PMU
installation in terms of the bus voltage, voltage control area
and tie-line observability. At the end of multi-stage PMU
placement, the proposed PMU placement technique will
render complete system observability with only phasor
measurements.
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