In this paper, a wide-area fault location (FL) method for power transmission lines is proposed. Impractical installation of modern measuring devices (e.g. PMU) throughout all network buses, due to lack of telecommunication infrastructures or funds, has imposed problems and a growing concern towards the wide-area FL problem with a limited number of measurement devices. In the most related researches, the optimal PMU placement problem for the FL and state estimation (SE) issues is separately studied. Also, the existence of occasional gross errors in the measurement set, due to cyber-attacks and various telemetry noise or failure, can bring about the wrong results for the FL algorithms. In the presented paper, a PMU placement scheme is proposed for achieving both state and FL observability. Furthermore, by utilizing this scheme, a new fault location algorithm capable of contemplating gross measurement errors has been proposed. Faulted lines have purposely assumed unknown. In addition, by employing the voltages positive-sequence components, results have shown immunity in regards to fault type and resistance. Comprehensive numerical simulations on the IEEE 14-bus, 57-bus and 118-bus test systems have demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed method and provided proof to this claim.

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