  The small amount of measurements in distribution grids makes their monitoring
more difficult. Topological observability may not be possible, and thus,
pseudo-measurements are needed to perform state estimation, which is required
to control elements such as distributed generation or transformers at
distribution grids. Therefore, we consider the problem of optimal sensor
placement to improve the state estimation accuracy in large-scale, 3-phase
coupled, unbalanced distribution grids. This is an NP-hard optimization problem
whose optimal solution is unpractical to obtain for large networks. Therefore,
we develop a computationally efficient convex optimization algorithm to compute
a lower bound on the possible value of the optimal solution, and thus check the
gap between the bound and heuristic solutions. We test the method on a large
test feeder, the standard IEEE 8500-node, to show the effectiveness of the
approach.
