New protection testing philosophy with emphasis on probing tests

A trend was recognized that utilities worldwide outsource manpower or experts for testing and commissioning. Service providers accept such challenges for utilities´ newly established substations. Although the engineers from service providers are usually very experienced with relay testing, some time-consuming tasks during the commissioning remains unchanged, e.g. the reasoning process on relay testing and so on. This paper emphasizes the needs on integrating probing test into the testing and commissioning jobs, and suggests the various probing tests logics which can be implemented into different protection functions. In addition, this paper illustrates how probing tests improve the efficiency of the test with practically considerations.