Optimized Allocation of Protection Centers in Communication Network of Wide Area Protection

The communication network plays a vital role in the operation of the wide area protection system, whose configuration determines the transmission path of the protection information, and thus affects the operation reliability and communication delay of the network. The allocation of the protection centers is one of the major factors that impacts the performance of communication network. In this paper, operation reliability of the communication network is analyzed by applying the minimum cut set method and the fault enumeration method. The expectation of communication delay considering possible faults is calculated and adopted as the criterion to optimize the allocation of the protection centers within the communication network. The communication network for the wide area protection of the IEEE 14-bus system is selected as the test system to carry out the optimization to the allocation of the protection centers. Based on the calculation results, it is verified the adopted algorithm is capable to minimize the communication delay with possible fault scenarios taken into consideration.