Fortive's CEO Kaizen: A Week of Continuous Improvement
Condition Monitoring Software in Electrical Infrastructure
Power Grid Monitoring with GridAssist PR
Since the advent of microprocessor-based devices (IEDs) to replace electromechanical devices to protect the grid, operators and regulators have observed a troubling fact: misoperations have increased with the complexity and sophistication of the technology, due primarily to the thousands of settings that must be designed, entered, tested, and maintained. In fact, industry regulators have noted that 40% of protection relay misoperations are caused by settings not matching their design, testing, and installation documentation. As a result, Utilities have been mandated (PRC-027) to conduct periodic audits and improve recordkeeping, a largely manual, error-prone, and expensive process.
Enter the GridAssist PR, the Settings Management feature supports automatic, periodic collection of relay settings from IEDs across the grid, comparison to their design baseline, and notification of Engineers via email and/or SMS when differences are detected. This reduces misoperations and provides Evidence of Compliance to a variety of PRC regulations.
The GridAssist PR continuously monitors the health and performance of your multi-vendor fleet of protection relays, with notifications for failures, disturbances, faults, and trips. Email alerts contain hyper-links to the tools that reveal root causes: Oscillography, Digital State Transitions, Weather and Lightning in-situ, Satellite and LiDAR imagery — all from your laptop, tablet, or mobile devices.
- Helps SCADA operators quickly and safely restore circuits to service.
- Helps P&C Engineers diagnose and report outages to regulators.
- Helps Asset Managers track the fleet by serial number/ firmware revision.
- Helps Planners identify reliability vulnerabilities and capacity shifts.
GridAssist PR supports data collection for the industry’s widest range of operational and non-operational datasets from the full fleet of multi-vendor protection relays, including:
- IEEE C37.111 COMTRADE
- Sequence of Events (SOE)
- Protection Scheme SETTINGS
- Asset Nameplate data
- Firmware Version
- Operational data elements
All industry-standard communications protocols such as IEC 61850, DNP3.0, and Modbus are supported by the GridAssist PR. More importantly GridAssist PR’s device communications platform supports the full range of legacy and proprietary protocols required to collect the complete non-operational datasets identified above from a diverse fleet of manufacturers, series, models, and firmware versions.
With the GridAssist PR, you have a Fault Analysis dashboard with easy navigation by Area, Substation, Device, and Date/Time range, and one-click access to all the datasets for a given disturbance or fault. The dashboard first presents key parameters (Fault Type, Distance-to-Fault, Fault Current), followed by one-click access to the Sequence of Events, Waveform Analysis, and Location on Map.
GridAssist PR can be integrated with GIS Mapping servers (on-premises or cloud-deployed) to provide fault location and geo-spatial awareness for its surroundings. Integration support is available for most popular GIS platforms, including ESRI ArcGIS and Open Street Map.
