Virtual Distributed Instrumentation in the substation environment

The remarkable achievements in the fields of networking and distributed processes technology are converging into a common platform for the development of new and innovative approaches to the most classical problems found in many fields of industry and especially in the substation environment. The evolution of the technology used to control the Power System has followed a clear trend over recent years: the standardization of communication and application protocols. Following this line, the Internet technology and its working principles are being adopted in more and more parts of the overall automation scenario. Virtual Distributed Instrumentation in the Substation Environment The Java-CORBA environment opens the door to the development of a mobile agent technology platform. Thanks to this, it will be possible to obtain an active distributed objects environment capable of hosting any kind of application and thus paving the road to an intelligent data gathering system implementation that could be applied either at the substation domain or even at the whole control network scope. The mobile agents’ technology allows the applications to move through the network and to be executed from anywhere. In addition, it will be possible to correlate data from different measurement environments or complement one measurement process with other information gathered form any other remote site. Sharing resources and the elimination of obstacles introduced by the communication networks will be the key that opens the door to a new concept of instrumentation and data gathering. The presentation and access interface of data is based on Web technology. Thanks to this, it will be possible to access the experiment tools using any kind of internet browser and therefore integrate different platforms into a common intranet, which would be accessible from anywhere connected to the network. The IP protocol is the network layer protocol adopted for the new UCA 2.0 / IEC 61850 [1] that will be used not only to communicate Control Center and substations but also at every level of the substation communication that implement local and remote control as well as local protection. The advantages introduced by the IP protocol at the network layer such as connectivity, reliability, and flexibility, have already been explained and thoroughly developed in previous papers[2]. Nevertheless, these advantages do not only improve the network layer but also pave the road to the introduction of new capabilities that improve the way applications interact and how information is decentralized thus gaining ubiquity since it could potentially be stored in, or retrieved from, any data repository located in every site of the network. The main goal of this project is to develop a technology that will allow virtual distributed research [3]. Therefore, the system will be orientated towards distributed objects with Web accessibility. The project is based on a number of existing technologies such as JAVA object technology, the Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) and the mobile agent technology. The applications distributed in an IP network will be accessible from any executed application in a server, as if they were physically situated in the same machine. SARTI 4 Figure1. System architecture and Components