Novel approach to relay setting development

The 2015 NERC State of Reliability Report states that 31% of mis-operations are attributed to incorrect settings/logic/design errors [1]. According to the report, one major cause of mis-operations is human error. We know today that the current relay settings development process is laborious and difficult to complete in an accurate manner with today's tools. This process requires the setting engineer to manually transfer vast amounts of data from short circuit programs to calculation sheets and finally to relay setting files. In addition, this process requires extensive resources in peer-peer review programs to minimize human error. Depending on the internal process of the utility, preventing errors might not be feasible with the current process. This paper outlines these deficiencies and presents an innovative novel method that unifies as well as drastically simplifies the relay setting process. This new approach proposes a new way to create intelligent calculation templates, eliminates human error due to data transfer, and automates the relay setting development process.