Resilient design of distribution grid automation system with CALVIN

The distribution automation system is vital for the safe and reliable operation of distribution grids. Typically, the automation architectures are either centralized or hierarchical. The monitoring and controlling of the grid is done by dedicated actors like the Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems and the Distribution Management Systems (DMS) or the Substation Automation Units (SAUs). These actors are deployed in dedicated machines and thus become a single point of failure in the automation system. Hence, the chances of blackouts are increased when any of these dedicated machines are compromised (due to either cyber-attacks or natural calamities). Therefore, special measures have to be taken that enable the migration of the functionalities of SCADA/DMS/SAU to a clean new machine, when the previous machine is compromised. This ensures higher availability and resilience of grid monitoring and control applications. This study presents the feasibility of using CALVIN IoT framework for providing such resiliency. A basic architecture for enabling the migration strategies with CALVIN is proposed and implemented. The results show that the CALVIN framework is a promising solution in providing resilience to the distribution grid automation.