Adaptive management of synchrophasor latency for an active phasor data concentrator

The Phasor Data Concentrator (PDC) is a device able to receive, collect and process the time-tagged synchrophasor data from Phasor Measurement Units (PMUs) and to forward the connected data to either an operational center or a higher level PDC, following a hierarchical architecture. The PDC is defined in the guide IEEE C37.244-2013, that describes the functionalities required and the test procedures. The PDC and the PMU were originally intended for monitoring applications in the electric transmission systems, but are foreseen to become a key element also of future distribution grids. In such an evolving scenario, the PDCs must be able to interface both with several PMUs with different configurations and with the higher level PDCs in a reasonable time, in order to guarantee good performance in terms of latency requirements for applications based on real-time monitoring. The PDC is the first element in the monitoring chain that retains an overview of the areas monitored by the underlying PMUs. In this context, the PDC should not only be responsible for collecting and aligning the synchrophasor data to forward the measurement to the control center of the grid operators, but it should play also an active role in the monitoring and protection applications. The aim of this paper is to propose advanced adaptive functionalities for an active PDC able to monitor the delay of each PMU input stream and modify the data aggregation to ensure compliance with time constraints related to a real-time application based on synchrophasor measurements.