Opportunities and Specific Plans for Migrating from PRP to TSN in Substation Automation Systems

Electrical substations are vital for the power grid, and Substation Automation Systems (SASs) have been employed to enhance substation functionality and safety. As the energy landscape evolves, substations face new challenges such as accommodating an increasing number of prosumers. Thus, SASs require a reliable substation communication network (SCN) capable of supporting real-time control and diverse applications. While Ethernet-based SCN technologies have emerged, they often fall short in meeting all requirements, including TCP/IP support, cost-effective fault tolerance, and managing traffic with different real-time demands. Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN) standards have shown promise in addressing these limitations by providing novel mechanisms. In this paper we compare TSN with the Parallel Redundancy Protocol (PRP) demonstrating that TSN offers better functionality and efficiency. In the direction of designing a comprehensive TSN-based architecture for SASs’ Distributed Control Systems (DCSs) we start here by proposing a roadmap for the fault tolerance aspects.