An integrated system for efficient management of distribution networks: The system's architecture and the telecommunication infrastructure

Modern distribution systems must keep up with high power quality standards due to the new regulations of the European Community and of the different national legislations. Efficient faults management is one of the basic tasks utilities must accomplish and this objective can be attained if and only if automation is present and efficient diagnostic procedures have been implemented in the centralized or distributed units all over the network. In this paper, the architecture of an integrated system for management of modern distribution systems is presented. The system includes routines for normal on-line optimal operation of distribution systems and for outage management, the latter including faults identification and location and service restoration operations. Another basic feature that is here analyzed is the required telecommunication infrastructure. After a brief description of the normal and outage management problems, the paper analyzes the different architectures that can implement the centralised and distributed architectures.