Power Engineer Journal

Indian transmission network is one of largest single national grid in the world. The Indian National Grid is having approx. 4,74137circuit kms and operates at one frequency. The robust National grid, which is also interconnected with neighbouring countries, viz., Bangladesh, Nepal, Bhutan, Myanmar, has facilitated development of vibrant power market enabling access to low-cost power supply in the South Asian region. Indian power sector is under transition towards achieving 500GW of non-fossil-based electricity installed capacity by 2030.

To address the increasing variability of hourly demand, increasing ramping requirements due to the sudden unpredictable impact of renewable energy, a robust and reliable communication system is a need of this hour to transmit right data to right place at right time to maintain Grid stability achieving smarter & more efficient Indian Power Sector. Centralized supervision for ensuring healthiness and for quick fault detection and restoration of the communication system is the utmost important to achieve the reliability and robustness.

Presently, power system communication node & the services running on it, is being managed by individual Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) through dedicated Network Management System (NMS). Each OEM has supplied their own NMS to manage their own equipment. There are standalone network elements also, for which there is no NMS available. Equipment of different OEMs and standalone network elements are interconnected, which becomes very challenging to manage the power system communication network.

In view of the rising complexities of the Electricity Grid & associated Communication Network; the requirement of a single system having details of all NEs (Network Element) of the complete network was felt strongly and thus Unified Network Management System (UNMS) scheme has been conceived. The UNMS shall integrate the existing NMSs of multiple Optical Fibre Ground Wire (OPGW) networks enabling a complete view of the communication network at National/Regional/State level in one system to address the emerging issues & challenges of the network.

This paper gives an overview of State-of-the-Art Unified Network Management System. for monitoring, managing, and configuring Multivendor and Multi-Technology Communication Network, which shall be deployed for the very first time in Indian Power System Communication System.