While most of the existing protection schemes have been designed with local information around individual components, these local schemes are not considered capable of protecting the modern electric power gird with growing complexity. Recent blackouts in North America and Europe have renewed the emphasis on coordinated protection and control actions to avoid systemwide blackouts, utilizing all of the available grid information. Thus, this paper proposes a new methodology, Agent-based Colored Petri Net (ACPN) modeling for systematically representing, modeling and analyzing information flows and interactions among the entities of the electric power grid. The paper demonstrates its efficacy and accuracy by investigating an ACPN model of a wide area protection system for a typical power grid. The proposed modeling and analysis schemes may further provide a framework to help assure reliability and interoperability of diverse smart grid components.