Observing the state of a smart grid using bilevel programming

Abstract

Monitoring an electrical network is an important and challenging task. Phasor measurement units are measurement devices that can be used for a state estimation of this network. In this paper we consider a PMU placement problem without conventional measurements and with zero injection nodes for a full observability of the network. We propose two new approaches to model this problem, which take into account a propagation rule based on Ohm’s and Kirchoff’s law. The natural binary linear programming description models an iterative observability process. We remove the iteration by reformulating its fixed point conditions to a bilevel program, which we then further reformulate to a single-level mixed-integer linear program. We also present a bilevel algorithm to solve directly the proposed bilevel model. We implemented and tested our models and algorithm: the results show that the bilevel algorithm is better in terms of running time and size of instances which can be solved.