The Future EMS Design Requirements

The Energy Management Systems (EMS) were invented in the seventies to add computationally intensive applications to the Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) Systems which were introduced as the core infrastructure for scanning the field data in the sixties. Over the last 50 years many EMS functions were implemented and SCADA was further enhanced. Recently, limitations of low scanning capability of traditional SCADA became obvious and new substation Intelligent Electronic Devices (IEDs) such as Digital Protective Relays (DPRs), Digital Fault Recorders (DFRs) and Phasor Measurement units (PMUs) offered much better time resolution of the filed measurements. Such developments led to a question addressed in this paper: how should future EMS systems evolve assuming that new IEDs may be integrated in a common data measurement infrastructure.