Generating substation network simulations from substation configuration description files

International audienceThe IEC 61850 standard has become the reference standard for substation configuration in smart electric grids, introducing data and service models to achieve interoperability between the network nodes. As the standard is currently based on the switched Ethernet architecture, there is a lot of work on its performance evaluation for guaranteeing real-time constraints. However, there still lacks a link between the substation configuration and its underlying Ethernet performance models (analytic or simulation). For bridging this gap, we propose in this paper a tool, called Simulation Tool for Analysis of substation netwoRkS (STARS) allowing the performance evaluation of any substation configuration through automatic generation of the corresponding simulation model from the Substation Configuration Description (SCD) file. STARS is based on the OMNeT++ simulator allowing the mapping of a real IEC 61850 system configuration to simulation parameters. It also provides a simple network configuration interface. This paper gives an overview of the STARS features through a simple example and points out its future evolution towards co-simulation of substation control algorithms, network performance, and electric grid behaviors

Software Defined Networks based Smart Grid Communication: A Comprehensive Survey

The current power grid is no longer a feasible solution due to ever-increasing user demand of electricity, old infrastructure, and reliability issues and thus require transformation to a better grid a.k.a., smart grid (SG). The key features that distinguish SG from the conventional electrical power grid are its capability to perform two-way communication, demand side management, and real time pricing. Despite all these advantages that SG will bring, there are certain issues which are specific to SG communication system. For instance, network management of current SG systems is complex, time consuming, and done manually. Moreover, SG communication (SGC) system is built on different vendor specific devices and protocols. Therefore, the current SG systems are not protocol independent, thus leading to interoperability issue. Software defined network (SDN) has been proposed to monitor and manage the communication networks globally. This article serves as a comprehensive survey on SDN-based SGC. In this article, we first discuss taxonomy of advantages of SDNbased SGC.We then discuss SDN-based SGC architectures, along with case studies. Our article provides an in-depth discussion on routing schemes for SDN-based SGC. We also provide detailed survey of security and privacy schemes applied to SDN-based SGC. We furthermore present challenges, open issues, and future research directions related to SDN-based SGC.Comment: Accepte