Performance Testing and Analysis of Multi-vendor IEDs under PRP Configuration

IEC 61850 standard has been introduced to facilitate the interoperability of intelligent electronic devices (IEDs) from different manufacturers. Although different communication network redundancy architectures have been installed and operated in many real-life digital substations, it is prohibited for conducting the real-life impact studies of various faulty components in data networks and fault conditions in power network on the installed protection and control performance. This leads a need to setup an experimental test bed to address the above mentioned impact studies of different faulty components in the data communication network and fault conditions in power network on P&C functionality and performance. For this reason, a virtual digital substation test bed was designed and built. Different case studies have been conducted for the redundancy network on multi-vendor equipment performance under different network faulty component conditions. The main contribution of this paper is formulating a data analysis methodology based on Q-Q method to validate the experiment data and the conduct the statistical analysis to quantify the impact of different network redundancy topologies on protection and control equipment performance. These findings may help power utilities in preparing to roll out full IEC 61850 based digital substations in the future.