At 10:36 a.m. 24/12/2011, Andrew McMillan wrote:
A system for scheduling meetings in an office isn't likely to care about leap seconds - it probably doesn't even care about seconds! But the same software can be used for storing schedules for machinery and other things where more precise synchronisation is more important.
You should consult with the protection engineers at Transpower and the Energy companies. Since 79/80 they have been running time-tagging on events, accurate to sub-second. I forget the accuracy as it was a long time ago now (I was at Westinghouse Automation, who supplied the SI SCADA). The time-tagging was developed from scratch by Westinghouse.. Time tagging is vital for fault forensics like you saw when Huntly dropped off this week. They need to analyse when each circuit breaker tripped or opened, down to the cycle level or below (cycle as in 50Hz). Adding in a second here or there makes a huge difference. The North Island network was seconds away from a 2-3 day outage. Richard