Capabilities and Prospects of State-Of-The-Art Protection Security Audit and Assessment Tools

This paper presents a novel approach to assess the performance of protection schemes and settings, and to improve protection coordination. It is designed to handle large and complex network structures, and to analyze the system behavior of the protection and power system as a whole. By means of performance indicators and intelligent result visualization methods the described protection security assessment solution helps to identify improvable or false settings, and limitations of the protection schemes. Operation and fault conditions resulting in non-selective trippings, mis-coordination of main and back-up protection, load encroachment as well as critical faults can be detected. The described solution addresses the newly arising challenges and the need for decision making support tools helping to improve power and protection system security. Findings from practical application examples discussing the effectiveness of automated protection security assessments to improve the system performance are presented.