Power system automation is heavily dependent on the reliable interconnection of power system field equipment and centralised control applications. Particularly important to achieve reliability in automated power systems is the redundant connection of field equipment controllers. Today, the fundamental redundancy management and switch-over processes are handled by the power system control applications itself. This, however, increases the complexity of the control systems and leads to an intersection of concerns. Consequently, the design and the implementation of field equipment controller redundancy is time-consuming and cost-intensive. In this paper, we propose the implementation of a redundancy virtualisation layer for power system controllers based on software-defined networking (SDN). The goal is to relieve the control applications from managing field level redundancy. Thus, our SDN approach allows to detect gateway failures and to perform transparent switch-overs. This significantly simplifies the configuration of the control application with redundant components and finally leads to more flexible and simplified redundancy design, deployment and operation. Arbitrary redundancy topologies, such as triple-controller-redundancy can be implemented without modifying the control applications.

中文翻译：

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使用软件定义的网络虚拟化电力设备控制器的冗余

电力系统自动化在很大程度上取决于电力系统现场设备和集中控制应用程序的可靠互连。对于自动化电源系统中的可靠性而言，特别重要的是现场设备控制器的冗余连接。如今，基本的冗余管理和切换过程由电力系统控制应用程序本身处理。但是，这增加了控制系统的复杂性，并导致了相互关注的问题。因此，现场设备控制器冗余的设计和实施既费时又费钱。在本文中，我们提出了基于软件定义网络（SDN）的电力系统控制器冗余虚拟化层的实现。目的是减轻控制应用程序管理现场级冗余的负担。因此，我们的SDN方法允许检测网关故障并执行透明的切换。这极大地简化了带有冗余组件的控制应用程序的配置，并最终导致更加灵活和简化的冗余设计，部署和操作。无需修改控制应用程序即可实现任意冗余拓扑，例如三重控制器冗余。