A strong smart grid requires relay protection not only to improve its performance, but enhance the optimization and coordination with stability control system as well. A new concept of hierarchical protection & control system oriented to regional grid security and stability was proposed. On the basis of conventional protection configuration, the substation-area protection & control unit and wide-area protection & control unit based on information sharing were set up. Then, the framework and function deployment of hierarchical protection & control system, as well as its application examples were introduced. Through the comparison with the existed protection scheme and wide-area protection scheme, its performance was also analyzed. The results have shown that the proposed hierarchical protection & control system can be promoted and applied in smart substation construction as application scheme.