The strain on modern electrical power systems has led to an ever-increasing utilization of new information and communication technologies (ICT) to improve their efficiency and reliability. Wide area monitoring and control (WAMC) systems offer many opportunities to improve the real-time situational awareness in the power system. These systems are essen-tially SCADA systems but with continuous streaming of measurement data from the power system. The quality of WAMC systems and the applications running on top of them are heavily, but not exclusively, dependent on the underlying non-functional quality of the ICT systems.

From an ICT perspective, the real-time nature of WAMC systems makes them susceptible to variations in the quality of the supporting ICT systems. The non-functional qualities studied as part of this research are performance, interoperability and cyber security. To analyze the performance of WAMC ICT systems, WAMC applications were identified, and their requirements were elicited. Furthermore, simulation models capturing typical utility communication infrastructure architectures were implemented. The simulation studies were carried out to identify and characterize the latency in these systems and its impact on data quality in terms of the data loss.

While performance is a major and desirable quality, other non-functional qualities such as interoperability and cyber security have a significant impact on the usefulness of the sys-tem. To analyze these non-functional qualities, an enterprise architecture (EA) based framework for the modeling and analysis of interoperability and cyber security, specialized for WAMC systems, is proposed. The framework also captures the impact of cyber security on the interoperability of WAMC systems. Finally, a prototype WAMC system was imple-mented to allow the validation of the proposed EA based framework. The prototype is based on existing and adopted open-source frameworks and libraries.

The research described in this thesis makes several contributions. The work is a systematic approach for the analysis of the non-functional quality of WAMC ICT systems as a basis for establishing the suitability of ICT system architectures to support WAMC applications. This analysis is accomplished by first analyzing the impact of communication architectures for WAMC systems on the latency. Second, the impact of these latencies on the data quali-ty, specifically data currency (end to end delay of the phasor measurements) and data in-completeness (i.e., the percentage of phasor measurements lost in the communication), is analyzed. The research also provides a framework for interoperability and cyber security analysis based on a probabilistic Monte Carlo enterprise architecture method. Additionally, the framework captures the possible impact of cyber security on the interoperability of WAMC data flows. A final result of the research is a test bed where WAMC applications can be deployed and ICT architectures tested in a controlled but realistic environment.