FT4TSNgrid - Fault tolerance mechanisms for power grid automation based on Time-Sensitive Networking

This work is supported in part by the Spanish Agencia Estatal de Investigación (AEI) and in part by FEDER funding through grant PID2021-124348OB-I00 (AEI/FEDER, UE). Climate emergency has forced governements to define urgent R&D&I actuation plans towards a climate-neutral society. In Spain, most of the actuation lines of the strategy AE5 Clima, Energía y Movilidad of the PEICTI 2021-23 and the priorities of the PNIEC 2021-30 and PNACC are focused on reducing greenhouse gas emissions, improving energy efficiency, increasing the use of renewable energies and energy storage, and digitalizing the electrical power grid to achieve a more decentralized, secure, flexible and reliable system for generating and distributing energy. Since the power grid is the backbone of all systems that produce and consume energy, these strategic lines of actuation can only be realized if the power grid itself is transformed into what is commonly known as the future smart grid. The IEC TR 61850-90-13 industrial report, published by the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) in 2021, specifies which are the new needs to be fulfilled for realizing the smart grid. One of the most important ones is to combine decentralized and centralized control of bidirectional flows of energy, to enable the prosumer paradigm in which the multiple actors of the grid both consume and produce energy. Decentralized control is carried out by a set of computational nodes which commmunicate and coordinate with each other to take decisions, constituting what is called a Distributed Control System (DCS). Examples of grid installations based on DCSs are power substations, which transform the electricity in each hop of the grid; or microgrids, i.e. local small-medium sized power grids placed in specific areas like neighbourhoods and which are normally based on a combination of renewable energy generators. As regards centralized control, it is expected to be carried out by centers that monitor and analyze data from the DCSs, together with knowledge produced by information technology (IT) third party systems, to perform grid-wide control and optimization based on new use cases in the context of Industry 4.0 within the IoT paradigm. These smart grid needs impose a set of new communication requirements that grid legacy communication subsystems cannot fulfil. The IEC TR 61850-90-13 itself concludes that the most adequate new communication technology for the DCSs of the future smart grid is the set of Time Sensitive Networking Ethernet standards of the IEEE (TSNS). TSNS are expected to be the link-layer set of standards of the whole automation industry, since they are the only ones that support at the same time real-time control traffic, network convergence, interoperability, seamless integration with TCP/IP, vertical integration and IoT features. Unfortunately TSNS do not address some Fault Tolerance (FT) key aspects esential for building highly reliable DCSs that can adequately support the smart grid's most critical parts: (1) do not provide time redundancy for efficiently tolerating transient faults in the communications; (2) do not include any plans for tolerating node faults; and (3) do not propose any complete fault-tolerant architecture to support highly reliable real-time critical DCSs. The general goal of this project is to address these issues by proposing adequate FT mechanisms and the way to integrate them into a complete fault-tolerant TSNS-based architecture that allows building highly reliable DCSs for the smart grid.