Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) play a key role in the integration of renewable energies into existing power grid infrastructure. In future, new applications such as power grid monitoring, control and distributed energy management will play a major role besides known applications such as metering and billing. Under new conditions (which include a large number of heterogeneous system elements in areas with different criticality levels), the solution still has to fulfil the same availability, security, resilience, and efficiency requirements. It is grossly insufficient to simply scale the ICT systems used in today's distribution grid operation and enhance them with a state of the art security concept. The established and currently applied procedures for aspects such as outage management, configuration of newly integrated networked components or testing of new IT network segments are typically manual in nature and are foreseen to be highly inefficient in a heavily ICT-dependent power grid operation scenario.
Virtualisation concepts from the ICT field such as edge and cloud computing as well as dynamic virtual local area networks and software defined networking, open a potential opportunity for practical key issues such as configuration of new protocol stacks, cross-layer optimisation between energy and communication networks, integration of non-IP traffic, legacy components or online integrity checks of energy and ICT systems. In the virtualised solutions, components of a distributed control system are virtually central and can be configured and operated at a virtual central location. The project VirtueGrid analyses how and how good these concepts can improve the relevant future use cases of power distribution.
New solution concepts are developed in the context of three research questions:
1. Which approaches allow for minimising configuration efforts and manual engineering in patch management when integrating large numbers of new intelligent power grid components?
2. How can system reliability be improved and graceful degradation be realised using re-location of distributed control processes in case of ICT malfunctions or even connection loss?
3. How does Software Defined Networking as a network virtualisation technique support situational awareness in power system ICT networks, i.e. proactive detection of overload, malfunctions or malicious attacks?
An evaluation of the developed concepts is done in a three-step approach in simulations, laboratory and in a real field environment of Linz Strom, KELAG/KNG and IKB.