Contents I. Introduction
Energy plays a major role in global economic landscape. Electric Power systems are considered part of critical infrastructure due to significant role these play in human lives by generating, transmitting and distributing energy to meet home and industrial needs. The fact that power systems involve human lives and expensive infrastructure such as turbines, generators and transformers etc. makes their automation mission critical in nature. The major elements of Industrial Automation Systems in context of Power Systems include Power Generation Automation, Substation Automation and Distribution Automation. In order to gain insight into automation it is essential to have a closer look at the processes that need to be automated. Hence we begin with a closer look at generation plants or power plants, then delving into substations. The primary equipment in the generation plant constitutes turbines, generators, loads e.g., motor, actuators e.g., solenoids, pneumatic valves and pumps etc. The pa-rameters which are monitored and controlled in the plants, pressure, temperature, flow etc. These parameters represent process values are monitored using sensors and controlled by help of actuators. In a typical conventional power plant, the total time taken to react to erroneous situations is in fraction of seconds and operate using closed loop control scheme.
