A Digital Substation Infrastructure for Education and Research on Protection, Automation and Control

This paper presents the newly installed digital substation infrastructure of the Protec-tion, Automation and Control Laboratory (PAC Lab), a dedicated subsection of the Power Systems Laboratory (PSL) of the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA). The infrastructure replicates the secondary equipment of a 150 kV substation of the Hellenic transmission system and, at its present stage, comprises two fully equipped transmission line bays from different vendors, a Siemens and an ABB substation/bay, operable as bays of the same or of two different substations. The bays integrate commercial protection and control Intelligent Electronic Devices (IEDs), IEC 61850 station buses over fiber optics, local SCADA systems, a substation gateway providing the interface toward a (theoretical) control center via IEC 60870-5-101, and state-of-the-art secondary injection test equipment. Beyond its educational role illustrated by a set of hands-on demonstration cases spanning secondary injection trip testing, closed-loop system-based testing and synchrophasor streaming the substation infrastructure supports secure remote experimentation by remote users (diploma, master and PhD candidates), research on innovative protection techniques, Hardware-in-the-Loop (HIL) studies in interconnection with the Real-Time Digital Simulator (RTDS) facility of the NTUA PSL, cybersecurity research in the Operational Technology (OT) networks of IEC 61850 substations, and multi-vendor interoperability testing.