Communication and Traffic Models for Power Systems

The Electric Power System is one of the most complicated systems to be managed and operated due its size, dynamic nature, fluctuations in demand and the large amount of heterogeneous components and devices involved from the generation of electrical power to the transmission and distribution to the final consumer. The communication infrastructure is the foundation for remote operation and demands on this infrastructure are rapidly increasing. Demands for faster and more accurate real-time communication over wide geographical areas as well as international exchange of critical operational and business data coupled with the increasing trend towards TCP/IP as the main protocol could result in vastly unpredictable and volatile heterogeneous communication infrastructure.
Traffic Models help in understanding the demands and dynamics of communication in the network in order to adequately adapt or design the communication system to meet requirements or users and monitoring and control systems that utilize it. The purpose of this is to study and model a communication network for power systems and implement these models in a communication simulator, specifically OPNET. The models should include physical and logical topologies, protocols and communication technologies utilized. In addition, the capturing of typical characteristic and traffic patterns for real time monitoring and control systems, e.g. periodic or bursty communication.