Practical Approaches for Digital Twin Representation of Protection and Control Systems

This paper presents the considerations, challenges, and solutions for the maintenance of digital twin representation of protection and control systems, ensuring the capacity to support critical needs such as relay settings design, fault analysis, protection performance studies, and compliance evaluations. The annual update processes developed by a major Canadian utility eliminates the typical misalignment of representation, convention, and methodology issues where digital twins are maintained by separate departments. These processes and implementations highlight the critical technical considerations for ensuring the accuracy in representing both system and protection functionality and behavior. The real-world approaches described in this paper are well-suited for sustaining digital twin models that can be utilized for powerful system-wide analysis for settings evaluation and for regulatory compliance.