Wide area network performance study of a distribution management system

Distribution automation is considered a necessity for providing better powe r service in a more competitive environment. When new automatic functions a re included in a distribution management system (DMS), loadings of the data links in the supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) system will become very heavy. in order to maintain a proper performance, system upgrad e or migration will need to be considered. Two wide area network (WAN) arch itectures for a Taiwan Power Company's regional DMS are investigated. The W AN modeling presented in this paper is aimed to verify whether the hardware design could accommodate the communications load and to avoid overpaying f or network equipments. Simulation results indicate that, to cover feeder au tomation functions, a WAN with distributed processing capability would prov ide better SCADA performance than an extension of the old centralized syste m. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.