A critical review on phasor measurement units installation planning and application in smart grid environment

Monitoring, detection, and measurement are vital in the energy system to facilitate better wide-ranging protection, control, and operation. In this regard, to offer a better operational and dynamic performance, Phasor Measurement Units (PMUs) are the prominent components and most desirable choices for transforming the conventional power system into a smart grid and micro-grid-based system. PMUs provide synchronized phasor measurements of electrical parameters such as current, voltage, and other information related to the system's status. However, one of the significant issues related to PMU placement is to place such that the system is fully observable and achieves better state estimation that has a crucial impact on planning, protection, control, and other factors related to the system's overall performance. This motivates the authors to extensively review the innovative approaches suggested by various authors and present their ideas, advantages, limitations, and untouched research gaps. Secondly, this review elaborates on these techniques’ concepts and mathematical details. Thirdly, various techniques are discussed categorically, starting from classical optimization techniques, heuristic and meta-heuristic-based approaches, hybrid techniques, and advanced methods. Also, the problem formulation for the PMUs placement is expressed, giving importance to the objective function, constraints, variables, and assessment index reflecting the optimality in placement. In addition, the future scope is presented to enlighten the researcher on critical discussions regarding the research gaps and fundamental changes to system topology and operation that must be focused on. In this review article, even though the methodologies are similar in approach, a micro-PMU (µPMU) placement is discussed as more important than the PMUs, looking at the present scenario and application in the distribution sector. This article also focuses on various PMU-related standards and real-time applications.