03. SoftGrid Architecture
SoftGrid Service Contains three main components.
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Web Service with the SoftGrid testbed. The testbed includes a Substation (IEDs only) and a Control Center.
NOTE : Please refer to the next section for more details of the SoftGrid Testbed Architecture. -
Security Solution or Gateway program/device manually connected by the user. There is a sample gateway program available with the SoftGrid, which can run even on a RPi.
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Web Service Client, to remotely manage the life cycle of the substations and Control Center.
As shown in the above diagram, substation is totally build on PowerWorld. PowerWorld simulates the physical power line in the back-end. The power line configuration is defined by the PowerWorld case files. There can be multiple threads in the substation, at least 2 for each IED. Each IED consumes and responds to incoming commands in IEC 61850 packets in MSS protocol. In the substation, mainly there are tow JVM to handle below operations.
- Real time command execution
- Generates real time log data for the Monitoring chart
- Unable to monitor transient mode power variable fluctuations
- Use Transient Clock to refresh and calculate the effect of already executed commands
- Execute periodically after few seconds by consolidating multiple commands together
- Generates transient mode power variable values
- Generates alerts on Limit Violations( e.g. Over/Under Frequency or Voltage )
Even though all the IEDs are running in the same windows computer with PowerWorld, SoftGrid supports multiple substation architecture as well. To create multiple substations you just have to follow below two steps.
- Initiate all the IEDs using one case file
- Connect multiple substation gateways, each connecting only to a subset of the IEDs.
Control Center is a sub module in the Web Service. The first control center command script initiates a singleton client instance and connects to the available Gateway. When a control command is issued to a gateway via Web Service, it will check for any Control Center Client Instance running. If the service doesnt have a gateway client instance, it will automatically initiate a new Control Center client prior to executing the command. The only two configurations required to define, is the ip of the gateway and the port number, in-line the command. Please refer to the getting started guide for more details on the remote control command structure.
NOTE : Control Center sends commands in IEC 60870-5-104 protocol via TCP.
As the Minimum requirement, the gateway must convert the protocols from IEC 60870-5-104 in TCP to IEC 61850 in MMS and mediate the packets to the correct socket of the IEDs. In order to do so, SoftGrid provides a sample Protocol Translator gateway, which can even be run in a RPi. However, user can connect any other translator devices or programs including industrial versions. In additions to the gateway, user can integrate additional security or non-security devices/programs such as firewalls in between the control center and the substation.
For the ease of the users, we have introduced a Web Service to create substations remotely and use a control center window to send API requests for the substation configurations, as shown in the below architecture.
As shown in the above SoftGrid lifecycle diagrame, operation commands can be initiated from the Web Service Control Client, including the Substation IEDs. However gateway software/devices should be connected to IEDs manually.
(Note : Substation IEDs can be started remotely as well as manually, and If you start manually you must close it manually when the experiment is over.)