Performance study of a special protection system

Various types of special protection systems (SPSs) for preventing major blackout and enhancing system reliability have been implemented worldwide. For an SPS that covers a wider area, one of the main concerns in the design on the system is the effect of communication conflicts and contention between devices on the total system operation. Contention causes work to be queued or blocked from execution and system performance may suffer as a result. In this paper, a discrete event simulation technique is used to study the communication performance of an SPS. The communication system of an SPS designed for relieving transient and dynamic instability is used for the study. The system modeling presented in this paper is aimed to verify whether the hardware design could accommodate the data traffic load and to avoid overpaying for hardware equipment. Through simulations the interactions among all devices and the bottlenecks of the communication system can be identified. Based on the simulation results, system designers could adopt available options to increase network bandwidth or hardware capability to maintain an adequate performance of the SPS system.