Quantitative modeling and analysis of substation automation systems

The application of digital technologies in power systems has resulted in an evolutionary replacement of electromechanical devices with numerical ones featuring internal digital processors with communication capabilities. A substation automation system (SAS) deploys substation operation functions, including control, protection, monitoring, and measuring. Ethernet technology and local area networks (LANs) make it possible to design substation communication architectures with greater reliability, availability, speed, and cost savings than conventional hard-wired systems. This paper proposes a new method to describe topologies of the SAS as an interconnected network. The concept of data conduction is introduced in this paper, and the advanced connectivity approach is implemented in the form of a linear programming optimization problem for all intelligent electronic devices (IEDs). All SAS values and specifications are available through several data structures, facilitating a quantitative reliability evaluation of the SAS. Two simple case studies show the applicability of this model.