Investigation of power system disturbances via Application Service Provider

Post-event investigation of faults and disturbances based on event records play an important role in maintaining acceptable level of power quality and reliability in electrical power systems. The main goal of an investigation is to find the cause of a recorded disturbance. Nowadays, it is common practice in power utilities, that a large number of disturbance records are collected due to the increasing number of installed digital fault recorders (DFRs) and other intelligent electronic devices (IEDs) in substations. Engineers have more recorded data than can be analyzed within the time available. Manual analysis of these records is both time-consuming and complex and for these reasons, many records may not be examined and much of their potential value would be lost. The main focus of this paper is presentation of an application service provider (ASP) model for disturbance investigation, and an overview of currently implemented services. Such services are designed to enhance manual investigations performed by engineers.