Tutorial - Study Committee B5 - The advancement of PACS architectures with focus on process bus implementation and virtualization of protection IEDs

Presenters : Alex Apostolov, Ratan Das, and David MacDonald

The tutorial focuses on ongoing PACS advancements towards the fully digital substation.
It reviews deployed process-bus projects, evaluating pros and cons of various architectures, engineering principles, deployment strategies, economic assessment and the business case for process bus, with lessons learned.
The shift toward both functionality-independent-of-hardware Protection, Automation and Control Systems as well as Virtualised Protection and Control (VPAC) are discussed, leveraging off advances in substation communication.
Solutions to conventional constrained asset lifecycle management are highlighted.
Concepts of the technologies, hardware and communication requirements, engineering process and testing and commissioning methods are discussed.