Real-time performance of virtualised protection and control software

Substation automation is ever challenged by the integration of distributed energy resources which imposes higher deployment flexibility and adaptability for protection and control. Although virtualization helps to run software applications independent of the underlying platform in IT infrastructures and cloud computing, it is still not commonly used in the field of substation automation. This is mainly due to the real-time performance demands of substation automation protection and control applications. In this article, we present an approach for running substation automation protection and control software in virtual environments. We contrast the real-time performance of different virtualization technologies under different workloads and focus on the performance evaluation of protection and control software in container-based solutions running on Linux with PREEMPT RT. We also present additional results for performance achieved in virtual machines. Our results clearly demonstrate that it is possible to run substation automation protection and control software in virtual environments while still providing the necessary performance. This paves the way for the deployment of substation protection and control software in virtualisation environments.