Data quality and reliability aspects of ICT infrastructures for Wide Area Monitoring and Control systems

Synchronized phasor measurement based Wide Area Monitoring and Control (WAMC) system is becoming a reality within international research and development both in academia and industry. Timely and accurate data with high resolutions holds great promise for more responsible and advanced grid control and operation. Currently, most of the research focuses on the different control schemes and applications. A relatively less addressed aspect is the dependency of the WAMC system on the performance of the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) infrastructure, without whose support the projected functionalities of the WAMC systems will be not achieved. Possible delays brought by the complex data transfer and processing processes in WAMC systems are addressed in the first part of this paper. Thereafter, simulations where delayed Phasor measurements are fed to a typical WAMC application - Static Var Compensation (SVC) are conducted iteratively to detect its maximum tolerated delay. Furthermore, performance requirements to design a reliable SVC function are analyzed based on simulation results. In conjunction with the requirement discussion, a robust ICT architecture is proposed to mitigate the data latency and incompleteness issue. The paper is concluded by addressing data quality issues relating to the remote signal based SVC controller system reliability.