Comparing protective-relaying commissioning and test philosophies and methods

This paper will discuss the differences in types of testing philosophies, test set units and different automated testing software used across different utilities. These differences typically arise due to legacy procedures, economic and scalability reasons and difference in understanding of industry best practices. Utilities have their own ways of commissioning and testing protection relays. Some utilities provide logic diagrams along with protection standards and during the commissioning stage the relay testers are expected to test the internal logic and perform dynamic tests, and end to end tests for the protection scheme. Other utilities require the relay techs to only perform static tests and functional tests in order to put the protection in-service. Utilities use different test sets with various capabilities to perform their commissioning and maintenance tests. This paper will present a detailed analysis of some of these differences and discuss their advantages and disadvantages.