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Reliable Communication Networks for Smart Grid Transmission Systems

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Abstract

In this paper, we discuss the communications reliability requirements posed by the smart power grid with a focus on communications in support of wide area situational awareness. Implementation of wide area situational awareness relies on both transmission substation networks and wide area optical networks. We study the reliability of a sample communications network of the California Power Grid and find that its reliability falls short of proposed requirements. To overcome this issue, we consider the problem of designing the substation network and the wide area network to meet the reliability requirements while minimizing the network cost. For the wide area network design problem, we propose two alternate design approaches, namely: (1) following the power lines and (2) a mesh based design interconnecting the nodes. For the first approach we develop two greedy iterative heuristics and a heuristic integer linear programming (H-ILP) model using minimum cut-sets for network reliability optimization. The greedy iterative algorithms outperform the H-ILP approach in terms of cost, but require a larger amount of computing resources. Both proposed models are in fact complementary and thus provide a framework to optimize the reliability of smart grid communications networks restricted to following the power lines. In the second approach a greenfield mesh network method is proposed based on starting with a minimum spanning tree which is then augmented through a greedy heuristic into a mesh. Comparative numerical results show that the reliable mesh design has advantages in terms of the number of links and total link distance needed.

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Acknowledgments

Martin Lévesque was supported by NSERC Postdoctoral Fellowship No. 453711-2014. Teresa Gomes work has been supported by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology under Project Grant UID/MULTI/00308/2013 and by iCIS Project CENTRO-07-0224-FEDER-002003.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Information Sciences, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, 15260, USA

    Velin Kounev, Martin Lévesque & David Tipper

  2. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, INESC Coimbra, University of Coimbra, 3030-290, Coimbra, Portugal

    Teresa Gomes

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  1. Velin Kounev
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  2. Martin Lévesque
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  3. David Tipper
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  4. Teresa Gomes
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Correspondence to David Tipper.

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Kounev, V., Lévesque, M., Tipper, D. et al. Reliable Communication Networks for Smart Grid Transmission Systems. J Netw Syst Manage 24, 629–652 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10922-016-9375-y

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10922-016-9375-y

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