Assessing hardware in the loop approaches for wide-area monitoring control and protection devices

Wide-area monitoring, protection, and control (WAMPAC) systems are expected to support the transmission system operators in maintaining stability and security of supply in the future power systems. The WAMPAC solutions heavily rely on deployment and use of phasor measurement units (PMU) and related communication technologies. Laboratory testing in a realistic environment utilizing hardware in the loop (HIL) approaches can be successfully used to evaluate WAMPAC functionalities algorithms and to accelerate proofs of concept. However, different implementations of the HIL testing can be adopted and their inherent characteristics affect both the accuracy of the results and the overall testing capabilities. The objective of this article is to provide a comparative assessment of three HIL approaches for laboratory testing of WAMPAC systems and devices. These testing approaches have been implemented in a laboratory configuration and applied to characterize WAMPAC devices. Moreover, methodologies to quantify the error introduced by these testing approaches in static and dynamic conditions are presented and applied to this laboratory configuration.