Toward a self-healing protection and control system

This paper first presents a review of the current technology in power system protection and control, including the protective relays, local controls and system controls. Then, this paper presents a couple of typical scenarios to illustrate the possible problems with the existing technology. Next, this paper proposes the vision of a self-healing protection and control system based on real-time, look-ahead simulation such as in every 5 to 15 minutes. This is different from the present technology such as Special Protection Scheme, which is based on a large amount of offline simulation runs. Last, challenges and technology gaps to implement the proposed idea are discussed.