Reliable Remote Relay Protection in Smart Grid

[Abstract] As the false trips of remote protection relays are among the main reasons behind cascading blackouts, it is critical to design reliable relay protection. Even though common protection schemes on traditional power systems have been investigated for a few decades, cascading failures in recent years indicate more research needed in this area. Consequently, researchers have proposed agent⁃based methods on the Smart Grid (SG) to address this issue. However, these existing agent⁃based methods simply use TCP protocol without considering real⁃time communication requirements (such as bandwidth and delay). To deal with this issue, several methods for efficient network resource management are proposed. Furthermore, these existing methods do not consider the potential issues in practical communication networks, which may result in delay violation and trigger relay false trips. We have discussed simple backup solutions in the previous work. In this paper, in addition to network efficiency, we focus on improving the system reliability by exploring known power system information and minimizing the chances of false trips of important remote relays, e.g., defining power line priorities based on their importance. Moreover, to further improve the system reliability, we also investigate the peer⁃to⁃peer protection approaches to address the single point of failure of centralized control center.

[Keywords] zone 3 relay; cascading failure; real⁃time communications; smart grid protection; power⁃aware resource management