A unified approach to robust meter placement against loss of measurements and branch outages

Abstract

This paper presents a systematic procedure by which measurement systems can be optimally upgraded. The proposed procedure yields a measurement configuration that can withstand any single branch outage or loss of single measurement, without losing network observability. It is a numerical method based on the measurement Jacobian and sparse triangular factorization, making its implementation easy in existing state estimators. It can be used offline in planning and meter placement studies or it can be implemented as part of the online observability analysis function. Details of the procedure are presented using numerical examples.