Development of a new open test platform for protective relay

This paper documents the development of an open platform that has the ability to test not only a commercial protective relay, but also enables the testing and development of relay algorithms. The platform documented has been shown to be able to assess and provide a comparison between protective relay algorithms, from simulation of a power system using PSCAD/EMTDC, generation of the fault waveforms, sampling of waveforms and performing the phasor estimation. The open platform also incorporates the facility to implement an interface based on IEC 61850-9 Sampled Values standard which could be used to assess the performance of and develop new algorithms.