ABSTRACT
The functions of future smart control centers can be classified as monitoring functions, assessment functions, and control functions. The wide-area Geographical Information System will cover a broad region, including the control center's own service territory as well as all interconnected areas, and even the whole Eastern Interconnection or Western Electricity Coordinating Council system. The chapter explores the vision with the technology of these three functions, and points out the technology and infrastructure gap that stands in the way of fully implementing the future vision. The chapter presents the vision of future control centers for real-time operation and discusses the infrastructure and technology gap, as well as the roadmap toward the proposed vision. In the future control center, system-level information will be obtained from the state measurement module based on phasor measurement units (PMU). PMU-based state measurement is expected to be more efficient than the present state estimation because synchronized phasor signals give the state variables, in particular the voltage angles.
