XML data interface and PMU testing applications for synchrophasor estimation with a reconfigurable controller

Phasor Measurement Unit (PMU) technology has rapidly improved over the last two decades. This development allowed a number of conventional protocols, both open and proprietary, to be written. Optimised communication and implementation techniques are sought by academia. This motivation has resulted in university projects, such as The OpenPMU project. The aim is to create a completely open source system that will be cost efficient, reliable, modular and platform independent. The discussed work is focused on the detailed description of a data interface XML based communication tool. The outlined schema is used to exchange data between the acquisition system and the phase estimation algorithm of a PMU. Its many advantages establish it as a flexible schema for transmitting sampled data irrespective of hardware or software implementation. The OpenPMU system is based on hardware implementations that use freely available DAQ devices and aim to develop a low cost alternative to commercial PMU's. The hardware described in this paper is based on a National Instruments field programmable gate array (FPGA) reconfigurable controller (cRIO) that due to its parallel nature can perform different processing operations at the same time. This results in higher speed and accuracy and should provide the benchmark for testing various existing and future OpenPMU implementations.