ICT Architecture Impact on Wide Area Monitoring and Control Systems' Reliability

Timely and accurate data with high resolutions holds great promise for more responsible and advanced power grid operations. The research has been focusing on design of monitoring and control scheme given the assumptions that the supporting information and communication technology (ICT) systems are capable of providing data and perform control with sufficient quality. A relatively less addressed aspect is the dependency of wide-area monitoring and control (WAMC) systems on their supporting ICT architecture which is usually a compromise between various concerns, such as data quality, interoperability, or security. Without an appropriate ICT architecture design, the projected WAMC system functionalities run the risk of being jeopardized. This paper begins with a presentation about possible delays brought by complex data-transfer and processing processes. Analytical experiments are conducted with purposes to quantify the maximum delay and input signal's sensitivity toward delay on a typical WAMC application where the control of static var compensation (SVC) is coordinated with generator excitations using phasor measurements. Given the characteristics of this particular control scheme, two possible ICT architectures that provide data with different qualities are compared concerning the reliability of this WAMC application. This paper concludes by proposing a generic ICT architecture, enabling efficient WAMC systems implementation in terms of data quality.