  Wide area measurement system (WAMS) is one of the essential components in the
future power system. To make WAMS construction plans, practical models of the
power network observability, reliability, and underlying communication
infrastructures need to be considered. To address this challenging problem, in
this paper we propose a unified framework for WAMS planning to cover most
realistic concerns in the construction process. The framework jointly optimizes
the system construction cost, measurement reliability, and volume of
synchrophasor data traffic resulting in a multi-objective optimization problem,
which provides multiple Pareto optimal solutions to suit different requirements
by the utilities. The framework is verified on two IEEE test systems. The
simulation results demonstrate the trade-off relationships among the proposed
objectives. Moreover, the proposed framework can develop optimal WAMS plans for
full observability with minimal cost. This work develops a comprehensive
framework for most practical WAMS construction designs.
