A robust techno-economic analysis of PMU-based islanding detection schemes

Traditional islanding detection schemes have mainly relied on voltage angle measurements obtained from PMUs for determining island formation. However, when placed in a network, PMUs measure both voltages and currents. In this paper, we test the hypothesis that better results can be obtained if other quantities measured by a PMU are also considered for islanding detection. Prior research considered device minimization as the primary objective for placing PMUs. An alternate formulation of the PMU placement problem that minimized total synchrophasor deployment cost has also been proposed recently. The second hypothesis that we test is if accuracies similar to what was observed with the device minimization objective are attained with the alternate formulation. Our results indicate that from a techno-economic perspective, better performance is realized if all the information provided by PMUs is used for decision making with the PMU locations computed using the alternate formulation.