Improving phasor data concentrators reliability for smart grid

Phasor data concentrators (PDCs) are the critical components of a wide area monitoring system (WAMS) in the smart grid. They are multi-processor devices employed to collect, concentrate, and synchronize phasor data that is from various phasor measurement units and from other PDCs. Because of their present significance and potential criticality for WAMS, reliability of PDCs has become a high priority problem. In this paper, we first formally model the reliability problem on PDCs. Then, we propose a novel task scheduling algorithm, two-phase heuristic task scheduling, to enhance the reliability of a PDC with real-time constraints of applications. This algorithm seamlessly integrates both tasks scheduling and reliability optimization techniques via appropriately allocate and reallocate tasks to different processors of PDCs. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm can efficiently guarantee reliability for PDCs with real-time constraints. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.