  Phasor Measurement Unit (PMU) technology is increasingly used for real-time
monitoring applications, especially line outage detection and identification
(D&I) in the power system. Current outage D&I schemes either assume a full PMU
deployment or a partial deployment with fixed PMU placement. However, the
placement of the PMUs has a fundamental impact on the effectiveness of the D&I
scheme. Building on a dynamic relationship between the substation voltage phase
angle and active power, we formulated the optimal PMU placement problem for
outage D&I as an optimization problem readily solvable by any heuristic
algorithm. We tested the formulation using a genetic algorithm and simulated
outages of IEEE 39 bus system. The optimal placement found produces a better
D&I result of single-line outages than a randomly scattered, tree-like, and
degree-based placements.
