Performance Evaluation of Intelligent Electronic Devices under Stressed Conditions

This paper presents a methodology for assessing the performance of Intelligent Electronic Devices under stressed conditions in a digital substation. The performance is characterized as the time response in sending an output GOOSE message triggered by a received input GOOSE message or alternatively as the time response for the activation of a protection function. The stressed conditions are intended to represent a high level of computational demand in the device. This is achieved by loading the device with an increasing number of functions and subscriptions to current and voltage sampled values. An experimental setup has been developed to reproduce the conditions in a digital substations and to implement the method for characterizing the devices. The performance is assessed based on the Ping-Pong methodology and traffic packets of the experimental setup are processed with a customized analyser of GOOSE messages. This analyser captures the GOOSE messages of the devices under test and calculates the performance index.