In this paper, we compare four measures of the empirical observability gramian, including the determinant, the trace, the minimum eigenvalue, and the condition number, which can be used to quantify the observability of system states and to obtain the
optimal PMU placement for power system dynamic state estimation. An adaptive optimal PMU placement method is proposed by automatically choosing proper measures as the objective function. It is shown that when the number of PMUs is small and thus the observability is very weak, the minimum eigenvalue and the condition number are better measures of the observability and are preferred to be chosen as the objective function. The effectiveness of the proposed method is validated by performing dynamic state estimation on an Northeast Power Coordinating Council (NPCC) 48-machine 140-bus system with the square-root unscented Kalman filter.
