Industrial Protection Use Cases¶
The equipment library converts familiar plant concerns into reusable network-level protections. The following scenarios describe what the customer gains in operational terms. They are supported by the delivered equipment, point, and protection catalog.
Protection coverage at a glance¶
The 66 delivered baseline protections cover four practical families:
Figure — Protection coverage follows the equipment protection lifecycle from modeling to evidence.
| Family | Delivered protections | Operational question answered |
|---|---|---|
| Binary status and state | 26 | Is this indication valid, and is an alarm or lockout active? |
| Analog operating range | 16 | Is the measurement normal, alarming, critical, or physically implausible? |
| Switching and relay command | 18 | Is this action approved, correctly sequenced, and permitted by plant state? |
| Setpoint command | 6 | Is this requested setting inside the approved engineering range and control sequence? |
Block a breaker command issued in Local mode¶
Situation: A remote Close reaches the feeder breaker while the device reports Local mode.
Protection outcome: The command, mode indication, and equipment identity are evaluated together. The non-compliant remote action is recorded in industrial terms and stopped according to the approved enforcement posture.
Customer value: Helps prevent unintended switching caused by configuration errors, automation faults, unauthorized control, or misunderstood field authority.
Inhibit closing while relay lockout is active¶
Situation: Lockout 86 is operated and a later breaker Close is attempted.
Protection outcome: The lockout indication supplies control context. The associated close can be rejected and the evidence retained for operations and investigation.
Customer value: Extends a familiar protection concept into network enforcement while preserving the relay and hardwired protection system as authoritative.
Detect Direct Operate where SBO is required¶
Situation: A breaker, recloser, sectionalizer, tie, capacitor bank, load-shed relay, intertie, or tap command bypasses the approved Select-Before-Operate sequence.
Protection outcome: The sequence violation is identified for the correct equipment and command. The event can be monitored during commissioning or blocked after approval.
Customer value: Detects a common and meaningful control-path deviation without requiring operators to interpret protocol details.
Reject an unsupported control action¶
Situation: A command code is valid at protocol level but is not approved for the target equipment—for example, an unexpected pulse action sent to a breaker that permits only latched Open and Close.
Protection outcome: The equipment-specific command profile distinguishes approved operations from syntactically valid but operationally inappropriate controls.
Customer value: Narrows the control surface to the actions the plant actually uses.
Protect a normally-open tie¶
Situation: A Close is requested for TIE-12-14.
Protection outcome: The command is evaluated against its normally-open purpose, Select-Before-Operate requirement, topology validity, and parallel-outage conflict condition.
Customer value: Makes topology-changing operations more visible and provides an additional enforcement point for an operation with potentially broad consequences.
Protect DER interconnection closing¶
Situation: A Close is requested at the DER-5 intertie.
Protection outcome: Approved action, sequence, bus-voltage condition, and synchronization or dead-bus readiness are considered before acceptance.
Customer value: Helps distinguish ordinary Open/Close traffic from a consequential generation-interconnection operation.
Detect transformer overload or thermal excursion¶
Situation: TR1 loading or winding temperature rises beyond the reviewed band.
Protection outcome: The event identifies the transformer, measurement, unit, observed value, and operating band. Alarm and invalid-range conditions are separated.
Customer value: Gives operators recognizable plant context and gives security teams evidence that can be correlated with control activity or abnormal communications.
Reject an invalid OLTC request¶
Situation: A requested transformer tap is outside positions 1–17 or bypasses the required control sequence.
Protection outcome: The request is blocked under the point profile and linked to the actual tap-position feedback for subsequent operational assessment.
Customer value: Reduces the chance that a malformed, misconfigured, or unauthorized setpoint becomes an accepted plant command.
Detect bus and regulator voltage excursions¶
Situation: The 11 kV bus or regulated feeder voltage moves outside its reviewed operating band.
Protection outcome: Low, high, and outside-permitted-range conditions are expressed with equipment identity and engineering units.
Customer value: Produces actionable OT evidence instead of an anonymous network alert and supports correlation with capacitor, tap, and switching operations.
Preserve protection and fault evidence¶
Situation: Relay trip, pickup, target, lockout, or downstream fault indication operates.
Protection outcome: The status is interpreted by its protection meaning, retained as evidence, and made available to related command decisions and normalized event handling.
Customer value: Helps operations, protection engineers, and incident responders work from the same sequence of industrial events.
Controlled customization¶
The library is not a fixed one-size-fits-all policy. Customers can retain a delivered definition, duplicate it for a device family, update point meanings and limits, add site-approved protections, and preserve the reviewed version used by each operational asset. See Engineering Lifecycle.