Simulation environment for centralized protection and control applying dSPACE and RTDS with IEC 61850 9–2 communication

The role of centralized protection and control system as a novel approach is important in terms of the protection of power networks. In centralized protection and control system, centralized computer receives the phase measurements from IEDs through the IEC 61850 9–2 sampled values. Based on these measurements, centralized computer instructs IEDs to perform necessary actions, according to the algorithms, to provide protection against faults. The aim of this paper is to describe the present centralized protection and control simulation environment at Tampere University of Technology. The present simulation environment has the ability to replay the pcap file and generate network traffic like real world traffic. In the present simulation environment, high resistance single phase to earth fault algorithm is implemented and successfully verified. In this simulation environment, dSPACE is used as centralized computer and real time digital simulator (RTDS) is used to simulate the network and IEDs in real time. The hardware of RTDS sends the measured data to the dSPACE IEC 61850 9–2 sampled values format. The simulation environment will enable researchers to test the protection algorithms in the real time e.g. their time performances.