Emerging ICT technologies to improve resilience of power grid monitoring systems

In recent years, the digitalization of energy infrastructure has become a priority in development plans. New paradigms such as cloud, fog, and edge computing, along with virtualization and orchestration techniques, are becoming keys to enable real-time monitoring. Among the measurement systems, synchrophasors provided by Phasor Measurement Units are particularly valuable, however, challenges arise in terms of resilience, scalability, availability, and cost of the measurement infrastructure. In this context, we investigate the potential solutions enabled by emerging ICT technologies for synchrophasor-based monitoring systems. Among these technologies, we also propose adopting the FLUIDOS computing continuum, currently under development in the FLUIDOS European project. This solution combines the automation benefits from the orchestration techniques with the advantages given by the edge/fog computing paradigm. This paper presents a physical implementation of a synchrophasor based monitoring system exploiting emerging ICT technologies to improve resilience and meet the demanding requirements of the evolving power grids. We apply this innovative architecture to monitor our Distributed Energy Resources Test Facility, which incorporates five real PMUs. With an experimental evaluation we assess the performance and capabilities of this monitoring infrastructure under different real-world scenarios, demonstrating a significantly enhanced level of resiliency.