Digitalization of Electromechanical Auxiliary Relays in Substation Automation System

Electromechanical Auxiliary (EA) relays aid in flexible and reliable protection solutions for a range of power system protection applications.. The conventional EA relays are simple low-end stand-alone devices without any data processing and communication capabilities. However, with the effect of digitalization and internet of things, the market trend is towards integrating the plant information with innovative, data-based services. Therefore, the low-end EA relays need to be augmented with smart, light weight communication solution along with the necessary edge computing which can cater to the digitalization requirement. The challenge lies is in providing light weight smart solution for EA relays without major hardware upgrade. The EA relays with the communication module need to be configured appropriately so that they become a part of Substation Automation System. Intelligent Electronic Devices (IEDs) in the Substation Automation Network are configured as per the IEC 61850-6 standard and configuring these IEDs is an effort consuming job. EA relays with the communication module possess very limited functionality and auto configuration for such modules is of high importance in order to minimize engineering efforts. This paper also describes the auto configuration methodology for the communication module when the module is connected to the Substation Automation Network and each of EA relays are represented uniquely and appropriately in the remote digital platform.