Disaster-Resilient PMU Network Design

The ability of phasor measurement units (PMUs) to precisely measure time-synchronized voltage and current phasors has made them a vital component of power grid monitoring systems. In a PMU-measured power grid, the measurement data is transferred via a communication network to the data monitoring station known as the phasor data concentrator (PDC) for data analysis. The PMU measurement-based applications depend on the observability of the power grid which relies on the availability of the PMU network (PMUs and their corresponding CNs). Multiple component (PMU and communication link) failure is a potential threat during high-impact events such as natural disasters or major cyber attacks, which could result in partial observability (in the worst case full unobservability) of the grid. Since it is not possible to maintain full grid observability during disasters when multiple components fail simultaneously, this paper proposes an observability-risk- aware resilient PMU network (ORARN) design framework that maximizes the expectation of the observability of the power grid buses. The proposed framework provides a disaster-resilient PMU network design that considers the probabilities of failures of the PMUs and the communication links and is constrained by a fixed total budget. Numerical studies are conducted on the IEEE 57-bus system to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed ORARN framework. The results obtained in the paper prove the effectiveness of the ORARN framework since it achieves a statistically higher power grid observability level under high-impact disasters when compared to an observability- risk-unaware baseline method.