Development of a Technique for Automated Testing of Digital Protection and Automatic Control System of Substation

The growing use of digital technologies in protection and automation control system (PACS) of substations allows the implementation of more and more complex and non-standard technical solutions. This leads to a complication of the form of presentation of the developed PACS, which ultimately makes it much more difficult to analyze and control them for compliance with the current rules and regulations. Obviously, in such conditions, if designing solutions are used without preliminary comprehensive testing using digital models of an electric power network, can lead to a significant increase in the period for commissioning, but more importantly, increases the risk of incorrect operation of PACS while exploitation.At present, carrying out such tests is a rather time-consuming and technically complex process, which includes creating a model of a power system fragment and connecting real PACS devices to it, forming a set of test scenarios, conducting tests and subsequent processing of test results.In addition, with an increase in the number of digital PACS devices at a substation and an increase in the degree of its "digitization", the number of tests that need to be performed to analyze the correct operation of the devices and the system as a whole increases, and the methods for conducting tests become more complicated. Making changes to the operating parameters of the electric power network model, regularly adjusting the settings of the PACS devices, as well as adding new test scenarios, lead to the need to repeat the tests many times.The current level of development of the PACS hardware and software and the emerging global trends towards the universality of their execution, along with the expansion of the use of digital technologies, open up new opportunities for automating the processes of testing the PACS implemented according to IEC 61850, including testing a designing solutions.