Optimizing the Joint PMUs and Wireless Sensors Placement in WAMS

Wide Area Measurement Systems (WAMS) enhance classical measuring techniques for power networks by bringing more sophisticated devices (PMUs) and enabling a more developed communication infrastructure (CI). During the deployment of a WAMS, these two aspects should be carefully assessed. While the optimal PMUs placement problem (OPP) had been intensively studied, the CI needs more attention. This paper tackles the problem of the optimal placement of wireless sensors over the network to insure its connectivity. A mathematical optimization formulation is firstly developed. An approximation resolution approach using the concept of the Steiner tree is then proposed. The obtained numerical results show that having a power network with a higher nodal degree lead to less needed sensors. Results also highlight the importance of jointly considering PMUs and sensors placement problems during the deployment optimization process. A sub-optimal approach is proposed to achieve resolution within reasonable calculation times.