Preventing false trips of zone 3 protection relays in Smart Grid

While remote zone 3 protection relays are essential to power systems, their false trips are also one of main causes related to cascading blackouts. Although many methods have been developed on traditional power systems to address this issue, the past cascading failure events showed the ineffectiveness of these methods. With the development of Smart Grid (SG), new agent-based methods have been proposed to address this issue by utilizing SG real-time communications. We found that these solutions simply assume ideal communication networks and do not consider the effect of practical network constraints and resource management. In this paper, we propose several solutions to address practical network resource management and constraints, and further improve the agent-based solutions in order to prevent the false tripping of zone 3 relays in various conditions. We also analyze the potential issues of these solutions, and point out the future investigation in this direction.