A New Approach to Determine the Optimal Number and Arrangement of Power Quality Monitors for Voltage Sag Detection
This paper presents a new approach to determine the optimal number and arrangement of power quality monitors (PQMs) for voltage sag detection. It is necessary to determine the optimal number and arrangement of PQMs since their installation at all buses in a network is an uneconomical option due to relatively high price of PQMs. The appropriate mathematical model, that describes the considered optimization problem, is created by using the concept of topological monitor reach area. A new definition of the cost function is presented in the paper in order to simultaneously determine the required number of PQMs and their best arrangement. Also, the effect of setting different values of monitor's coverage control parameter on the obtained results is analyzed. Four optimization methods are implemented to solve the considered problem: Binary Bat Algorithm, Binary Dragonfly Algorithm, Binary Particle Swarm Optimization and Genetic Algorithm. The presented approach is tested on the IEEE 34-node test system. Simulations proved that the Binary Bat Algorithm has the best performance in terms of computational time, convergence and the probability rate of finding the global optimum.