Deploying a wide-area monitoring, protection and control (WAMPAC) system based on synchrophasor and synchronized measurement technology for operational use presents some special challenges. The system needs to be able to support a wide-range of applications that are either already on the market or under active research and development.
There is an order of magnitude increase in the data volume compared to other systems that the supporting communication infrastructure, database systems, and data analytics platform must be able to handle. Data and information exchange with other entities and systems is a key aspect of a WAMPAC system for achieving true wide-area situational awareness capability and implementing more advanced monitoring, protection and control applications. However, it substantially increases the complexity in deploying such systems in terms of ensuring overall system security and quality of services.
The Quanta Technology team has supported a number of successful major WAMPAC system deployment projects, both U.S. and international, and can provide a full-range of services, from initial planning to full deployment, to help you achieve your company's WAMPAC system deployment objectives and business needs.
Roadmap to a Cost-Effective Deployment
A typical WAMPAC system deployment is not a one-time project for many reasons:
- There is a limited number of beneficial applications available and/or identified in early deployment
- Resources and funding constraints at the time of initial deployment
- Unfamiliarity with the technology
Most systems will go through multiple stages to add more PMU measurements, add new and/or enhance existing applications, expand the system capacity, and interface with more data sources and/or data consumers before reaching a full-scale deployment. A comprehensive deployment roadmap is a multi-year strategic implementation plan that provides directions and guidance to reach the desired deployment objectives.
A roadmap should:
- Properly identify key business needs and drivers with quantifiable benefits and projected return on investment
- Select the right applications that address the identified business needs
- Prioritize the deployment milestones, tasks and processes (considering the independencies among various tasks of the deployment), achievable benefits, and resource and investment constraints.
A well-developed roadmap should enable each stage to leverage the infrastructure, components, applications, and other system resources invested in the stages preceding to it, thereby minimizing the total investment and the life-cycle cost.
WAMPAC System Architecture
A solid system architecture design is the very foundation for any successful implementation of a WAMPAC system to minimize life-cycle costs. WAMPAC system architecture design presents some unique challenges for a number of reasons. The design should be able to support a wide-range of applications, both existing and future applications, to:
- Meet their specific requirements,
- Facilitate data and information exchange with large numbers of systems and entities
- Ensure the highest level of security and overall performance (e.g., availability, latency, etc.) at the same time
- Handle a high volume of data with ease
- Be easily expandable for a multi-stage deployment
As with any system, the WAMPAC system architecture design should also make it very easy to configure, maintain, manage and use. Taking a short-cut on system architecture design may result in some short-term cost savings, but could be very difficult to change later on, which will be much more costly than any initial cost savings, leading to a much higher life-cycle cost of the system.
