Container-based Virtualization of an IEC 61850 Substation Co-Simulation Approach

In automated structures of the power grid, such as the digitized substations, dependencies of the functionality on the communication network are increasingly the focus of considerations. A co-simulation enables the joint and holistic analysis of the two subsystems – the power grid and the network communication infrastructure. Our approach presented here is considered with the real-world requirements of IEC 61850-based substations and is assigned to them. From this, the requirements for co-simulation and coupling of the two subsystems are derived. Using the IEC 61850 communication standard consequently, a substation can be fully described and automatically passed to the co-simulation by a presented framework to perform analyses in real-time online operation. By automation, the framework can reduce the implementation effort, which is usually significantly higher within virtualization than in available network simulation systems. Under certain prerequisites and conditions, our approach enables the generation of valid network traffic, which can be used for downstream analyses of the network.