Automated substation monitoring, diagnostics, and remote control systems provide many useful operational advantages. Their widespread use is however limited because of high costs making them economically infeasible. The needs have been concluded to develop new low cost communications and control concepts for medium voltage devices that would enable grid operators to benefit from the advantages by making such solutions economically feasible. This work looks into different solutions to the distance control and monitoring of medium voltage devices and targets to implement a pilot system as an approach to validate the ideas and find possible improvements for the future deployment of such system in industrial use. The objective is to design and implement a reliable and secured wireless remote control and monitoring system based on current available commercial wireless communication networks e.g. GPRS/EDGE/UMTS. Various solutions involving system modular structures, communication means, reliability and security enhancement etc have been proposed and analyzed according to the strict requirements, out of which comes the design and implementation of the pilot system.

Yang Liu is a PhD Researcher in the Department of Production at the University of Vaasa and also a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Information Technology of Vaasa University of Applied Sciences, Finland. His research interests include evaluation of global operational competitiveness and performance enhancement of wireless communications.