Towards the Smart Grid: Substation Automation Architecture and Technologies

Abstract

This paper deals with Industrial Control Systems (ICS) of the electrical sector and especially on the Smart Grid. This sector has been particularly active at establishing new standards to improve interoperability between all sector players, driven by the liberalization of the market and the introduction of distributed generation of energy. The paper provides a state-of-the-art analysis on architectures, technologies, communication protocols, applications, and information standards mainly focusing on substation automation in the transmission and distribution domain. The analysis shows that there is tremendous effort from the Smart Grid key stakeholders to improve interoperability across the different components managing an electrical grid, from field processes to market exchanges, allowing the information flowing more and more freely across applications and domains and creating opportunity for new applications that are not any more constraint to a single domain.