Wireless communication aided differential relay protection in smart grids: A concerted blitzkrieg

Protective relay is used to protect power systems. The main requirements on protective relays are selectivity, reliability and speed. Differential relay, which is based on the measurements of currents and the exchange of messages among relays, is the most reliable one among all types of protective relays. Wireless communication is proposed for the information exchange in the differential relay. Based on the communication network among relays, a generalized differential relay scheme is proposed to incorporate secondary relays. The mathematical tool of Petri net is used to model the wireless communication based differential relay scheme. The problem of resource allocation for the wireless communication network is studied in order to maximize the system reliability, based on the Petri net modeling. Numerical simulations have demonstrated the validity of the proposed relay scheme.