Virtualising Redundancy of Power Equipment Controllers Using Software-defined Networking

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