Towards the Smart Grid: Substation Automation Architecture and Technologies

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. 1. Introduction The electrical grid undergoes a fundamental change with the introduction of the Smart Grid. Installation of end consumer smart meters, deployment of distributed renewable energy generation, and interconnection of operation and information systems require new solutions that can intelligently monitor and manage the infrastructure. The Smart Grid aims on raising operational efficiencies of operators by increasing the flow of information and automation in order to enable better and faster decisions, hence reducing operational cost. In order to achieve this, utilities are facing some challenges to improve the power delivery methods and utilization, including the integration of control room systems for better workflow, new consumer demands, and security of supply. Additionally, future trends and developments in operations centers, for example, Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems, can be observed.(i)Integration of operations’ centers for smart distribution grids includes the advanced integration of existing IT infrastructure as well as the development of new applications.(ii)SCADA systems are becoming increasingly ubiquitous. Thin clients, web portals, and web based products are gaining popularity with most major vendors but also introduce additional security aspects.(iii)SCADA systems become more integrated and connected with existing Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems and other non-SCADA or external applications but require new, tailored architectural approaches to guarantee continuous operation of critical resources.(iv)Information Technology (IT) and