Design and Performance Assessment of a Virtualized IED for Digital Substations
This work addresses the need for cost-effective, scalable alternatives to hardware-based IEDs in digital substations, but the results are incremental as they confirm expected performance without major breakthroughs.
The paper develops and evaluates a virtualized Intelligent Electronic Device (vIED) for digital substations, demonstrating that it achieves acceptable response times in real-time simulations, validating its suitability for critical time-sensitive environments.
Digital substations have significantly enhanced power grid protection by replacing traditional copper wiring with fiber-optic communication and integrating IEC 61850-compliant Intelligent Electronic Devices (IEDs), resulting in greater efficiency, reliability, and interoperability. While these advancements provide improved interoperability, challenges such as high costs, complex networks, and limited upgradeability persist. To mitigate these issues, the virtualization of IEDs has emerged as a cost-effective solution, offering scalability, simplified maintenance, and reduced hardware costs by replacing traditional hardware-based IEDs with software-based counterparts. However, the performance and reliability of virtual IEDs (vIED) must be rigorously evaluated to ensure their robustness in real-time applications. This paper develops, implements, and evaluates a vIED designed to match the performance of its hardware-based counterparts. The vIED was deployed on a server using virtual machines, with its core logic implemented in low-level programming languages to ensure high-speed, deterministic behavior. The performance was evaluated using real-time simulations, focusing on the response times of the protection functions. The results demonstrated that vIEDs achieved acceptable response times, validating their suitability for deployment in critical time-sensitive environments within digital substations.