Agent Based Supervision of Zone 3 Relays to Prevent Hidden Failure Based Tripping1

Shravan Garlapati, Hua Lin, Santhoshkumar Sambamoorthy, Sandeep K. Shukla, James Thorp
Bradley Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Virginia Tech

Blacksburg, Virginia E-mail address: {gshra09, birchlin, ssan, shukla, jsthorp}@vt.edu

Abstract In this paper, we propose a distributed agent based supervisory scheme to make Zone 3 relays robust to hidden failure induced tripping, facilitated by the communication network -- soon to become an integral parts of the smart grid. Possible elimination of Zone 3 relays (remote backup protection) has been studied in the recent past and these remote backup relays have been adjudged to be essential for power system protection [23]. Even though Zone 3 relays are often overly sensitive to remote line overloading, and are known to cause unwarranted trips during cascading failure scenarios, they are prescribed as acceptable means for remote backup. Therefore, providing robustness to Zone 3 relays to minimize the risk of erroneous trips, especially when hidden failures [10, 1] make them vulnerable to over reaction, is an important problem. In our scheme, a synchronous grid is populated with agents at each relay, and an agent hierarchy is maintained in master/slave relationship. The communication established between relay agents decreases the probability of erroneous Zone 3 trips thereby preventing them from aggravating cascading failure scenarios, and reducing the probability of cascading blackouts. Unlike other agent based relay proposals, ours is a nonintrusive approach. Keywords-component; Zone 3 Relays, Remote Backup Protection, Hidden Failure, Cascading Blackouts, Agents, Communication, TCP/IP, UDP

I.

INTRODUCTION

Transmission systems with protective relaying usually have redundancy in the form of local and remote backups. The idea is to quickly isolate the fault conditions and power system equipments from the whole system in order to ensure stability and security. This needs to be done with minimal disruption of service to customers. It has been observed [3, 23] that local backups could be susceptible to common mode failures due to sharing of the same electrical and communication infrastructure. Remote backup or Zone 3 relays are usually located in remote substation, isolated from the substation where the original disturbance occurred, and hence is not susceptible to such common mode failures. However, remote backup requires longer fault clearing times, and more load may be removed when a remote backup is called upon to isolate a fault. Therefore, unless absolutely necessary (when Zone 1 and Zone 2 relays fail to isolate the fault for various
1

This research was partially funded by an NSF-EFRI grant.

reasons), it should be not allowed to trip. After a comprehensive study of a number of historically disastrous blackouts such as the 1965 Northeast blackout, the 1977 New York blackout, and the 1996 western blackout, NERC authenticated that unwarranted zone 3 relay failures have been involved in 70% of the blackout events [16, 2]. But [3, 23] clarified that Zone 3 relays cannot be dispensed with. It is known that Zone 3 relays can actually erroneously trip due to hidden failures [10, 1]. A hidden Failure is usually rare but could happen due to software or hardware errors in the Zone 3 relay. It may go unidentified for a long time. However, such problems may manifest as extra sensitivity of a Zone 3 relay to even remote line overloading. Even though such an overloading might be transient, or might not have reached a level where the Zone 1 and 2 relays need to act, an overactive Zone 3 relay may trip, starting a sequence of other trips which may lead to a cascading failure. In [1] a large number of such scenarios were simulated and many of the cascading failure so discovered matched with historical chains of events in cascading blackouts recorded by National Electric Reliability Council (NERC). Hidden failure may be present in any equipment in the Electric power network, especially as they become more hardware/software dependent. One of the main components of the Smart Grid vision is that the power system will be enabled with communication networking to unprecedented level, and wide area measurements and controls will provide the power system (transmission and distribution) with unprecedented robustness. The architecture, media, protocols for such communication network is still being developed, but it is conceivable that empowered by the wide area visibility, fast communication, and computation, control functions can indeed provide such robustness and prevent untoward incidents such as cascading blackouts. In this paper, we are considering one question in this context. The question is: How can a communication network and fast computing abilities enhance the functionality of Zone 3 relays so that they can be robust to hidden failures, and over active undesired tripping can be prevented? In this paper we attempt to answer this question by first developing a distributed hierarchical agent based scheme and then demonstrating a few simulations based experimental data to backup the possible validity of our scheme. However, the problem at hand is as much a problem in the domain of distributed fault-tolerant computing with networked

978-1-4244-6511-8/10/$26.00 2010 IEEE

256

communication, as it is a power system protection problem. The solution we provide here is based on certain idealization and our scheme will work under those idealizations, explicitly stated in the next subsection. However, we believe to solve this problem we need to proceed incrementally, first by devising a scheme that works under a few ideal assumptions, and then carefully enhancing the scheme as the assumptions are gradually removed. A. Assumptions To simplify the first order solution, we assume that the communication network is robust and no computing node or the communication links can fail. So we are making an important assumption that even though a Zone 3 relays relaying functionality (may be hardware or software or mechanical) may be susceptible to hidden failure, the agent functionality we impart is somehow special, and cannot be subject to hidden failure. This can be achieved by redundancy and autonomous monitoring. We are not concerned in this paper about how to achieve this software robustness. However, we do not assume anything special about packet losses in the network, for example, we assume that UDP packets may be dropped, and we also do not make any special assumptions about network delays. Our simulations actually simulate various TCP/IP based protocols for communication, for various physical media, and various traffic scenarios. The reason why we make the assumption about non-failing nodes and links is that in the next iteration of our scheme, we plan to devise fault-tolerance features connected to network failures, and current scheme does not consider that. We also assume that we can run an agent on each protection relays as they are usually intelligent electronic devices (IED) capable of running specific application software. One important distinction of the solution in this paper with other agent based relaying schemes (e.g. [15,14]) is that our agents are nonintrusive in the sense that they do not take over any relaying functions, but just monitor and provide information to the relays. The rest of the paper is organized as follows: Section II describes some relevant related work. Zones of protection along with problem related to zone 3 relays usage are explained briefly in section III. PSLF and NS2 simulations along with network architecture details are provided in section IV. Results, conclusion and future work are addressed in section V, and section VI. II. PREVIOUS WORK

system dynamics of blackouts in power transmission system [7]. Chen et al. developed a hidden failure embedded DC model for power transmission systems and studied the power law distributions in North American blackout. They also evaluated possible mitigation measures after investigating global system dynamics [8]. Dobson et al. developed a loading-dependent analytical solvable model for general probabilistic cascading failure analysis [9]. Phadke examined the mechanisms of hidden failures of the protection system and their role in power system disturbances [10]. Chowdhury et al. developed methods to create cascading failures in large interconnected power systems under different credible contingency conditions. Using 118 bus systems they proved that their methods can be used to report several cases of cascading outages [11]. There are also some studies done on the hybrid simulation of both combined power systems continuous and communications discrete event dynamics. NS2/adevs based hybrid simulation scheme is used to study the automatic under frequency load shedding of IEEE 14 bus system [12]. Automatic frequency maintenance is demonstrated with an integrated information and electric grid model [14]. In [14] an agent based backup protection system is developed for transmission networks. They used EPOCHS a federation of power and network simulators - to study the protection scheme [14]. In this work, we do a trace driven simulation approach to experimentally validate our scheme. We simulate a power system model dynamics separately and create cascading outages due to a sequence of Zone 3 relay trips following a real fault event. We then use the timed traces from the power system simulator and simulate the corresponding network with NS-2, to estimate the delays in communicating between various agents running on the various relays. This allows us to refrain from combination simulators which are time consuming to build, but it serves our purpose of demonstrating the validity of our scheme. III. BACKGROUND

The operation of the distance protection relays is governed by the ratio of the magnitudes of current and voltage sensed by the relay. This ratio is the impedance between the relay and the fault, and hence the electrical distance. To account for the uncertainty in the distance setting of these relays and to ensure that there are no blind spots, the protection scheme is stepped.

This section briefly summarizes the work done by other researchers in analyzing cascading outages, performing combined power and communication simulations. Thorp et al. studied the anatomy of cascading outages in a system due to hidden failures and proposed few preventive strategies [2, 4, 5]. Wang et al. have simulated a large number of cascading outages and proposed an idea for optimal location of relays for protection system enhancement [1]. Nedic et al. developed an AC blackout model, examined and verified criticality of a 1000 bus network by creating cascading failures [6]. Carreras et al. developed a dynamic model to study the complex global

Figure 1. Zones of Protection

257

In fig.1, consider the relay R12 protecting the transmission line between bus 1 and bus 2. The primary Zone of protection zone 1 is set between 85% and 90% of the line length and operates instantaneously. To avoid blind spots in the vicinity of bus 2, another zone of protection, Zone-2 is set at 120% to 150% of the line length. A co-ordination delay of 0.3 seconds is allowed, before Zone-2 operates. Another protection zone, Zone-3 spanning 100% of the line between bus 1 and bus 2 and 120% - 180% of the next line, acts as a back-up for the succeeding distance protection relays. A coordination delay to the order of 1 second is allowed for Zone 3 operation. The coordination delays provide selectivity in isolating a faulted section and at the same time, ensure reliability of operation of the protection scheme [22]. Directional distance relays(Mho Relays) are widely used for identifying phase faults in long transmission lines. In our discussion, we assume all distance relays to be directional. IV. PROBLEM DESCRIPTION

As discussed earlier, our goal is to prevent Zone 3 relays from becoming over eager to trip as the directional impedance sensed by it reaches within 3x of its setting. In [1, 4] it is argued that as the sensed impedance reaches this threshold, the probability of its tripping increases exponentially. More formally, the probabilities of exposing a hidden failure for line protective relay are calculated as . (1)

Where Z is the impedance seen by the relay and Z3 is zone 3 relay setting. These probabilities are obtained from statistical model for two types of hidden failures presented in [18]. Simulations based on such conjecture actually validated the intuition. Given that a Smart Transmission system will be equipped with wide ranging networking and relays and other IEDs today have capability of running application software, we want to leverage these capabilities to run distributed set of agents on the IEDs which will communicate via the available networks, and provide distributed intelligence to the system so Zone 3 relays cannot falsely trip. V. PROPOSED SCHEME

In our scheme, each relay (Zone 1, 2 and 3) has an associated software agent that is capable of communicating via various network protocols to other agents. Whenever a relay picks up for a fault, or senses a change in breaker status, the corresponding agent records it, and if required communicates the information to other agents. The agents can also be queried by other agents. We endow a set of agents with higher privileges and responsibilities, and call them Master agents. The rest of the agents are seen as slaves to one or more master agents. The entire transmission system can be partitioned into multiple domains, and each domain has one master agent and many slave agents. The Master agent has the topology of transmission system within its domain, including the relays and breakers. All other agents in the domain are considered as slave agents. In our scheme, whenever a zone 3

relay senses a fault in its zone as a reduction in impedance, it queries the domain Master agent if any other slave agents associated with the associated set of Zone 1 and Zone 2 relays reported any anomaly. The Master agent then requests the status of the remaining slave relay agents. Based on the response of the other relays, the Master agent can decide if Zone 1 or 2 could not clear a fault that Zone 3 must act upon. If not, the Zone 3 will periodically query Master agent until the faulty condition is either cleared or the Master agent instructs the Zone 3 relay to continue with its trip timer. This will reduce the probability of false trips by Zone 3 relays if implemented correctly. The request, response delays of communication must be within the time allowed for Zone 3 relays to wait before tripping. The choice of the networking topology, the communication protocol, and the physical media of the network will affect these delays. Also, whether to use the Internet, or dedicated network (the traffic in the Internet might not be conducive to the short delay requirements for the query-response scheme) will also have to be decided. In our experiments this is exactly what we have done by first creating cascading failures in PSLF and then simulated a number of network topologies, for various protocols, and communication media, for various traffic scenarios on NS-2 to compute delays incurred in our agent based scheme. As an illustration, consider a part of the IEEE 39 bus system, as shown in the Figure 2. For a fault on the transmission line between 17 and 27 in the vicinity of bus 17, and let us assume Zone 3 of relays a, d, f and g sense this fault. Ideally the Zone 1 of relays c & c, Zone 2 of relays b & e and Zone 3 of relays a, d & f should see the fault. Based on the response of the relays, the Master agent would locate the fault and would allow the Zone 3 timers of relays a, d and f to continue, whereas it would block the Zone 3 timer of all the other relays (g in this case). If there is any Zone 1 or Zone 2 relay operation and subsequent circuit breaker operation, resulting in a successful clearing of the fault, the Master Agent would silence all the Zone 3 timers. Thus the operation of Zone 3 is under the supervision of the Master Agent. One other foreseeable benefit of this scheme is the identification of hidden failures in these relays. For example, in the above scenario if any of the listed relay pick-ups is not observed or other relays(like g) respond, it is an indication of a hidden failure in the relay that has not responded or responded wrongly, in sensing the fault. This scheme can be further extended to supervise Zone 2 protection also, provided reasonable communication delays are present. VI. EXPERIMENTS

Our experiments consist of simulations in PSLF (for running power system simulations) and NS2 (for running communication network simulations). A. PSLF Simulations: We simulated possible blackout scenarios in the test case of a power system network in PSLF [17], based on a statistical model for estimating the presence of hidden failures in impedance relays leading to a false Zone 3 tripping. Among all algorithms for simulating cascading failure scenarios, we

258

chose the algorithm described in [1]. This algorithm predicted 41,053 reasonable blackouts out of 167,752 simulations on the NYPP 3000 bus model. Heuristic random search algorithm in [1] has been modified for our purpose, which is omitted here due to lack of space.

Figure 4. IEEE-39 Bus system [19] B. NS2 Simulations: The Zone 3 relay supervision scheme we propose is a timecritical application. When faults are observed in Zone 3 relays, relay status checking and breaker cooperation need to be done within a short time slot to prevent failure to propagate and expand. Hence the end-to-end latencies between relays and the master agent become crucial to implement this scheme. In this paper, to gain better evaluation of communication latencies, several network infrastructures for the Zone 3 supervision scheme are simulated in Network Simulator 2 (NS-2). We simulate the end-to-end round trip communication delays between each relay under supervision to the master agent. Combinations of different network topologies, network transport protocols, link bandwidths and background traffic conditions are fully compared. We report experiments with three distinct communication network topologies for the IEEE 39-bus system. In the first case, we assume the network topology is same with the power system topology. In this model, each bus in power system has a corresponding communication node (router or host) and parallel to each transmission line there is a communication link. We place the master agent at bus 16 (communication node with the highest degree in this network). We allocate local bus agents to other buses which monitor the status of relays in their vicinity. In the second case, we consider an alternative topology (star topology) in which each bus agent has a dedicated communication link to the master agent. In the third case, we examine a more practical network configuration which is shown in Fig. 5. Instead of using local bus agent, we assume each protection relay to be an agent which can communicate with master agent directly. In this way, relays near a bus/substation compose a local area network (LAN) which uses Ethernet as link layer protocol. Then relays can send message from this LAN to other LANs or master agent through routers. The links between LANs are the same with the first case.

Figure 2. A part of the IEEE-39 bus system

The IEEE 39 bus model, shown in fig 4 was used as the test case for studying possible paths of cascading failures. The IEEE 39-bus model is modified to include dynamic models for load shedding and Generator protection. Under frequency Load shedding relays were used to shed loads in four stages at all the Load buses. Similarly, generator protection relays were used to protect the generators against under/over frequency, under/over voltage, over/under excitation and over-current conditions.

Figure 3. Communications in our Scheme

259

Two network protocols are considered: UDP and TCP. UDP is an unreliable transport protocol but it is best effort, fast and has less overhead and it is always feasible to add reliability to it at the application layer. TCP is a reliable transport protocol with flow control and congestion control functionality. When the network is heavily congested TCP could result in extensive delays. Both of these two are widely used in Internet at present and are believed to play important role in smart grid applications.

Table.1 shows these maximum delays in the first network which has the same topology as the power system. From the results it can be promptly determined that power line carrier is not suitable for our scheme because of its low bandwidth and susceptibility to EMI noise. With extra traffic, large amount of data are dropped due to congestion. Although it already find its application in distribution systems, power line carrier is not suitable for long distance transmission system communication. Another observation is UDP delay is slightly smaller than TCP delay although the difference negligible when we have sufficient bandwidth. Both of UDP and TCP performance degrade when background traffic exists however the delays are still acceptable if we have enough bandwidth. Table.1 Maximum delays in the network sharing same topology with the power lines
PLC UDP without Traffic TCP without outTraffic UDP with Traffic TCP with Traffic 962.4ms 1122ms N/A N/A Copper 12ms 13.2ms 31.2ms 32.8ms Fiber 2.496ms 2.496ms 2.528ms 2.528ms

Figure 5. Network Infrastructure for IEEE 39-bus system Three physical media are used to model the communication links in the system including power line carrier, copper line and optical fiber which represent low, medium and high bandwidth respectively. Lastly we consider two background traffic conditions in our simulation. In first case no extra traffic exists. In the second case, every local agent is set to send messages to the master agent 60 times per second. This is the communication rate current digital relays can achieve [21]. VII. RESULTS Using the simulation described in section VI, we compiled a list of several blackout paths. For each network topology, each protocol and communication media, we experimented on NS-2 to measure the end-to-end communication delays to compare against the delay between subsequent trips of Zone 3 relays in our blackout scenarios. The goal of the experiments were to check under which communication topology, protocol, media and traffic scenarios our scheme will be effective in blocking false trips of Zone 3 relays. The results from the simulation introduced in previous section are summarized here. Considering the Zone 3 relay supervision scheme we propose, a set of average round trip delays between each local agent to the master agent is obtained from the simulation trace file. Then the summation of two longest delays within this set represents the worst delay scenario from a Zone 3 relay inquires the master agent until it receives feedback. Table.2 shows the results for the network has dedicated links. The delays are apparently smaller than the previous case. But this network could be impractical in real implementation because dedicated links increase the cost exponentially and most of the bandwidth is wasted. Table.3 shows the results from the network consists of many LANs which is the most practical network configuration. The delays are a little bit higher than the previous two but in this case the traffic is heavier because more agents are considered. Another reason for higher delay is that within a LAN, agents need to contend for usage of the communication media. The data link protocol will affect the throughput and delay in the LAN. Nevertheless the delays still can satisfy the communication requirement for our scheme.

Table.2 Maximum delay in the network with dedicated link to master agent
PLC UDP without Traffic TCP without outTraffic UDP with Traffic TCP with Traffic 160.4ms 640.4ms N/A N/A Copper 2ms 4.8ms 3.6ms 5.2ms Fiber 0.416ms 0.464ms 0.432ms 0.448ms

260

9. I. Dobson, B.A. Carreras, D.E. Newman A loadingTable.3 Maximum delay in the hierarchical network with LANs in the substation
PLC UDP without Traffic TCP without outTraffic UDP with Traffic TCP with Traffic 1082.588ms 2002.748ms N/A N/A Copper 12.188ms 22.748ms 48.4ms 50.8ms Fiber 2.684ms

10. 11.

3.024ms 3.014ms

12.
3.104ms

VIII. CONCLUSION We presented a hierarchical agent based supervisory scheme to reduce the possibilities of unwarranted Zone 3 relay trips but providing the relays with more situational awareness about the other relays and breaker status for parts of the network the Zone 3 relay is backup for. We experimented with various communication topologies, protocols, and media to figure out which topology, media, and protocol would make our scheme feasible. It is clear that with Fiber media, all possible protocols, and topologies will allow enough slack in latency for our scheme to work. IX. REFERENCES

13.

14.

15.

1. Hongye Wang, J.S. Thorp Optimal Locations for

protection system Enhancement: A simulation of cascading outages, IEEE Transactions on Power Delivery, vol. 16, no. 4, October 2001. J. S. Thorp and A. G. Phadke, Protecting power systems in the post restructuring era, IEEE Computer Applications in Power, vol. 12, no.1, pp. 3337, Jan. 1999. S.H.Horowitz and A.G. Phadke Third Zone Revisited IEEE Transactions on Power Delivery, Vol. 21, No. 1,january 2006 J. S. Thorp, A. G. Phadke, S. H. Horowitz, and C. Tamronglak, Anatomy of power system disturbances: Importance sampling, International Journal of Electrical Power & Energy Systems, vol. 20, no. 2, pp. 147152, Feb. 1998. S. Tamronglak, A. G. Phadke, S. H. Horowitz, and J. S. Thorp, Anatomy of power system blackouts: Preventive relaying strategies, IEEE Trans. Power Delivery, vol. 11, no. 2, pp. 708715, Apr. 1996. Dusko P. Nedic, Ian Dobson, Daniel S. Kirschen a, Benjamin A. Carreras c, Vickie E. Lynch c Criticality in a cascading failure blackout model, Science Direct Electrical Power and Energy Systems 2006. B. A. Carreras, V. E. Lynch, I. Dobson and D. E. Newman Complex dynamics of blackouts in power transmission systems Chaos, vol 14, no.3, Sep 2004. Jie Chen, James S. Thorp, Ian Dobson Cascading dynamics and mitigation assessment in power system disturbances via a hidden failure model, Science Direct Electrical Power and Energy Systems 2005.

16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

2. 3. 4.

5.

6.

21. 22. 23.

7. 8.

dependent model of probabilistic cascading failure, Probability in the Engineering and Informational Sciences, vol 19, no 1, Jan 2005, pp. 15-32. Arun G. Phadke Hidden failures in electric power systems, International Journal of Critical Infrastructures, vol 1, no.1, pp 64-75, Jan 2004. Badrul H. Chowdhury, Sushant Baravc Creating Cascading Failure Scenarios in Interconnected Power Systems, Proc. IEEE Power Engineering Society General Meeting, Montreal, Canada, June 18-22, 2006. James Nutaro, Phani Teja Kuruganti, Laurie Miller , Sara Mullen and Mallikarjun Shankar Integrated HybridSimulation of Power and Communication systems In Proceedings of the 2007 IEEE Power Engineering Society General Meeting, pp. 1-8, June 2007. James Nutaro, Phani Teja Kuruganti, Mallikarjun Shankar, Laurie Miller, and Sara Mullen Integrated modeling of the electric grid, communications, and control International Journal of Energy Sector Management, Vol. 2, No. 3, pp. 420-438, 2008. Wang, X.R., Hopkinson K.M., Thorp, J.S., Giovanini, R., Birman, K., Coury, D., Developing an Agent-based Backup Protection System for Transmission Networks. First International Conference on Power Systems and Communication Systems Infrastructures for the Future. 23-27 of September 2002, Beijing, China. Hopkinson, K.M.; Birman, K.P.; Giovanini, R.; Coury, D.V.; Wang, X.; Thorp, J.S., EPOCHS: Integrated Commercial Off-The-Shelf Software for Agent-based Electric Power and Communication Simulation 2003 Winter Simulation Conference. 7-10 of December 2003, New Orleans, USA. D. Novosel, M. M. Begovic, and V. Madan, Shedding Light on Blackouts, IEEE power & energy magazine, Jan. & Feb. 2004. http://www.gepower.com/prod_serv/products/utility_softwa re/en/ge_pslf/index.htm K. Bae and J. S. Thorp, A stochastic study of hidden failures in power system protection, Decision Support Systems, vol. 24, no. 3/4, pp. 259268, Jan. 1999. Ian A. Hiskens Significance of Load Modeling in Power System dynamics, x symposium of specialists in electric operational and expansion planning, May 21st-25th 2006. Jonathan William Stahlhut, Timothy James Browne, Gerald Thomas Heydt, Vijay Vittal Latency viewed as a stochastic process and its impact on wide area power system control signals IEEE transactions on power systems Vol 23 No 1Feb 2008. http://www.selinc.com/issue3/ Horowitz, Stanley H. and Arun G. Phadke. Power System Relaysing . Hertfordshire, England: Research Studies Press Ltd., 2004. NERC System Protection and Control Task Force. Report, Rationale for the Use of Local and Remote (Zone 3) Protective Relaying Backup Systems, System February 2005. http://www.nerc.com/docs/pc/spctf/Zone3Final.pdf

261