Research Article Towards the Smart Grid: Substation Automation Architecture and Technologies

Copyright © 2014 A. Leonardi et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. This paper deals with Industrial Control Systems (ICS) of the electrical sector and especially on the Smart Grid. This sector has been particularly active at establishing new standards to improve interoperability between all sector players, driven by the liberalization of the market and the introduction of distributed generation of energy. The paper provides a state-of-the-art analysis on architectures, technologies, communication protocols, applications, and information standards mainly focusing on substation automation in the transmission and distribution domain.The analysis shows that there is tremendous effort from the SmartGrid key stakeholders to improve interoperability across the different componentsmanaging an electrical grid, fromfield processes tomarket exchanges, allowing the information flowing more and more freely across applications and domains and creating opportunity for new applications that are not any more constraint to a single domain. 1