Wide area network performance study of a distribution management system

Moving towards a more competitive environment, distribution automation is considered a necessity for future power system operations. To include new automatic functions in a distribution management systems (DMS), loadings of the data links in the SCADA system will become very heavy. System upgrade or migration will need to be considered such that it can maintain a proper performance. To avoid overpaying for network equipment or services, two wide area network (WAN) architectures for a Taiwan Power Company´s regional DMS are investigated. The WAN modeling is aimed to verify whether the hardware design could accommodate the communications load and ensure that transit times are within the system´s functional requirements. Simulation results indicate that a WAN with distributed processing capability would provide better SCADA performance than an extension of the old centralized system that covers the feeder automations