An Optimal PMU Placement Scheme for Detection of Malicious Attacks in Smart Grid

State estimation is the core operation performed within the energy management system (EMS) of smart grid. Hence, the reliability and integrity of a smart grid relies heavily on the performance of sensor measurement dependent state estimation process. The increasing penetration of cyber control into the smart grid operations has raised severe concern for executing a secured state estimation process. The limitation with regard to monitoring large number of sensors allows an intruder to manipulate sensor information, as one of the soft targets for disrupting power system operations. Phasor measurement unit (PMU) can be adopted as an alternative to immunize the state estimation from corrupted conventional sensor measurements. However, the high installation cost of PMUs restricts its installation throughout the network. In this paper a graphical approach is proposed to identify minimum PMU placement locations, so as to detect any intrusion of malicious activity within the smart grid. The high speed synchronized PMU information ensures processing of secured set of sensor measurements to the control center. The results of PMU information based linear state estimation is compared with the conventional non-linear state estimation to detect any attack within the system. The effectiveness of the proposed scheme has been validated on IEEE 14 bus test system.