Investigation of open standards to enable interoperable wide area monitoring for transmission systems

Nowadays, power systems face more challenging network wide issues with regard to ensuring secure and reliable operation. Therefore, having a wide area monitoring system is a vital need in order to detect problems and react on them as quickly as possible. An important component when providing wide area monitoring and control for transmission networks is the SCADA system, which connects the substations to the control center by polling data from Remote Terminal Units (RTUs). However, due to data rate limitations, the monitoring is relatively static and therefore infrequent. By using Phasor Measurement Units (PMUs) data can be provided in higher rates and with higher accuracy. Since different manufacturers exist in the market, standardization is the key for advancement of the connectivity and interoperability within the system. In the past, utilities used to employ proprietary protocols, which were specified by the product vendors. Gradually, it was decided to move towards open standards to provide an interoperable environment and improve modelling capabilities. Apart from PMU standards, in a typical power system several communication protocols exist and are required for transferring data and each of them covering certain domains and specific groups of data. The objective of this paper is to investigate the adoption, development and performance of the most common open standards to enable interoperable wide area monitoring systems.