IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON POWER SYSTEMS, VOL. 23, NO.

2, MAY 2008

[3] N. G. Bretas and J. B. A. London, Measurement placement design

and reinforcement for state estimation purposes, in Proc. 2001 IEEE
Power Tech Conf., Sep. 2001, vol. 3, pp. 1013.
[4] J. B. A. London, L. F. C. Alberto, and N. G. Bretas, Network observability: Identification of the measurements redundancy level, in
Proc. 2000 Int. Conf. Power System Technology, Dec. 2000, vol. 2, pp.
577582.
[5] G. Peters and J. H. Wilkinson, The least-squares problem and pseudo
inverses, Comput. J., vol. 13, no. 4, pp. 309316, Aug. 1970.

Closure to Discussion on Placement of PMUs to Enable

Bad Data Detection in State Estimation
Jian Chen, Student Member, IEEE, and Ali Abur, Fellow, IEEE
The authors are grateful for the discussion which allows clarification
of some important issues.
In order not to crowd the reference list, reference [3] is used, since it
contains descriptions and/or references to the methods followed in our
paper. Specifically, the numerical method that is used to identify the
critical measurements in the paper is described in detail on pages of
reference [3, pp. 9092]the book entitled Power System State Estimation: Theory and Implementation. Please also see reference [1] on
Generalized Observability Analysis and Measurement Classification
by A. Gomez-Exposito and A. Abur for more details on the identification of critical measurements. Section III-A closely follows the method
developed in [1].
In the same section of the book, the PetersWilkinson decomposition is also used and the relevant reference is given. This method, which
is proposed in [2], can be considered as an extension of Gaussian elimination. It is quite useful in solving the normal equations. In this technique, a mxn matrix H can be decomposed into a unit lower trapezoidal

Manuscript received July 25, 2007.

J. Chen is with the Department of Electrical Engineering, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX 77843 USA (e-mail: jianchen@ee.tamu.edu).
A. Abur is with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering,
Northeastern University, Boston, MA 02115 USA (e-mail: abur@ece.neu.edu).
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TPWRS.2008.920736

817

mxn matrix L, and an upper triangular nxn matrix U. More details can
be found in the Appendix of the paper as well. Reference [2] does not
contain any method related to observability analysis and our paper does
not make any claims to that effect. The decomposition is used in step
1 of the algorithm in section III-A with proper reference to [2] for decomposition of the H matrix.
The discussors state that the method to determine the critical measurements by checking the null columns of Kred is given without proof.
The reason is that the proof is already available for the interested reader
in [3, p. 91], where the redundant measurements are expressed in terms
of the essential measurements via the matrix T. Please note that this matrix T in [3, eq. (4.66)] is the same as Kred in the paper.
The main objective of this paper is to enable bad data detection for all
measurements by strategically placing a minimum number of PMUs.
An algorithm is developed and presented for this purpose. An extension of the algorithm is also presented where the local redundancy is
increased to some desired level by adding more PMUs. The extension
of the algorithm transforms some of the critical pairs so that errors in
them can be identified; however, as indicated clearly at the bottom of
Section III-E2 of the paper, there is no guarantee that all critical pairs
will be transformed.
As for the example in Fig. 2 of the discussion, the measurement
system after the placement of the injection is more reliable and desirable than without it. Without the injection, no matter which measurement is in error, bad data can never be detected. However, with
the injection measurement, irrespective of which of the three measurements are in error, bad data will be detected. Creation of critical pairs
via placement of the injection is a small price to pay for having the capability to detect bad data which is otherwise not detectable.
We thank the discussers again for giving us a chance to elaborate on
the above issues.

REFERENCES
[1] A. G. Expsoito and A. Abur, Generalized observability analysis and
measurement classification, IEEE Trans. Power Syst., vol. 13, no. 3,
pp. 10901096, Aug. 1998.
[2] G. Peters and J. H. Wilkinson, The least-squares problem and psudeo
inverses, Comput. J., vol. 13, no. 4, pp. 309316, Aug. 1970.
[3] A. Abur and A. Gomez Exposito, Power System State Estimation
Theory and Implementation. New York: Marcel Dekker, 2004.

0885-8950/$25.00 2008 IEEE