Analysis of data quality issues in Wide Area Monitoring and Control systems

Synchronized phasor measurement based Wide Area Monitoring and Control (WAMC) system is becoming a reality with international research and development both in academia and industry. Timely and accurate data with high resolutions holds great promise for more responsible and advanced grid control and operation. Currently, most of the research focuses on the different control schemes and applications. A relatively less addressed aspect is the dependency of the WAMC system on the performance of the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) infrastructure, without whose support the projected functionalities of the WAMC systems will not be achieved. Possible input delay brought by the complex data transfer and processing processes in WAMC systems are presented at the beginning of this paper. Thereafter, simulations where delayed phasor measurements are fed to a typical WAMC application - Static Var Compensation (SVC) are conducted iteratively to detect its maximum tolerated delay. Based on this maximum tolerated delay, the consequences of missing certain data in the phaor packets have been studied. Furthermore, data quality requirements to design a reliable SVC function are analyzed based on simulation results. In conjunction with the requirement discussion, the paper is concluded by proposing a robust ICT architecture to mitigate the aforementioned data quality issues.