A Hardware-in-the-Loop co-simulation architecture for power system applications in virtual execution environments

The integration of Cyber-Physical Energy Systems (CPES) via the technique of virtualization has the potential to notably advance power system automation. Future power systems - especially Smart Grids - will increasingly rely on software and therefore extend the interwoven dependencies between the power system and its Information and Communication Technology (ICT) infrastructure. This, in turn, will inevitably lead to increased system complexity and as a consequence to new management, safety and security challenges. We believe that encapsulating the monitoring, control or protection software in Virtual Machines (VMs) is able to provide a remedy for many of these challenges. However, to the best of our knowledge there exists no work on how to develop or test virtualized power system applications nor on how the complex dependencies between the power system and the ICT could be taken into account during the development of such an application. In this paper we present a Hardware-in-the-Loop (HiL) co-simulation architecture which addresses both of these issues. Further, we provide a proof of concept of our development and evaluation platform for virtualized CPES applications and discuss the benefits and challenges to this approach.