Automatic Fault Analysis and Visualization of Digital Substation Event

The industry trend, in deployment of digital substations and network of substation devices, has resulted in an increased amount of digital data captured by electric utilities. This considerable amount of data requires attention in its management, analysis, trouble-shooting, and decision-making process. The power system operators as well as protection engineers are often overwhelmed by the volume and complexity of data they have to deal with in case of cascaded events within a substation. To solve the challenges and take advantages of latest technology on the big data processing, this paper discusses an automatic and efficient approach in analyzing the Sequence of Events and Comtrade files obtained after a substation event using the fault tree analysis. The fault/event tree nodes are created with the help of logic diagrams and by simply importing the Comtrade file(s) or actual relay setting(s) to allow the protection engineer to build the event trees for an entire substation rather easily. Using this approach, the event trees can be searched using the tree traversal algorithms intelligently and the cause of the event can be displayed visually with an associated timestamp. The proposed solution can be used inside any utility substation, laboratory environment, or control centers to assist operators and protection engineers to trace the root cause of events in a much faster way and generate an accurate fault analysis report.