
The so-called "energy revolution" and simultaneous digitization of the energy sector have increased the complexity of the energy supply. In future, the energy system will be made up of many small producers, storage facilities, and numerous heterogeneous ICT components for networking and intelligent control and automation.
One challenge of these smart grids is the accelerated rollout of information and communication technology, which dynamically develop and adapt the energy system – but in this application context they have never been tested for their interaction and interdependencies. In addition to this, external cyber-criminal attacks represent a significant risk and are a key issue.
The Smart Energy Simulation and Automation (SESA) Lab allows large-scale, real-time co-simulation of impacts on energy supply systems under realistic conditions to facilitate integration of new components into the system; to identify critical situations; and to develop any adaptations that might be required. The SESA-Lab infrastructure comprises of following main features:
A special feature of the SESA Lab installation is the topology free allocation and combination of inputs and outputs. To ease the simulation planning and execution process, SESA includes a virtualization server (VM cluster) that can provide virtual machines for software-based simulations (with the possibility of coupling with hardware-based real-time simulation and automation system in the Lab), development environments, or licensing servers for possible runtime environments. Such a virtualized and topology free allocation allows SESA to provide remote access to external users.
Large scale Real-time and offline Smart Grid simulations
Prototyping for Smart Grid control concepts
Framework to assess cyber-security/communication integrity and response mechanism
Development and testing of added value services based on Smart Meter Gateway Infrastructure
SESA-Lab includes a smart grid control room workplace to test new functionalities of future energy grid and adequate provisioning of information to humans as well as to train operators for the new situation. In this control centre, three industrial SCADA DMS are installed (PSI Control, KISTERS ControlStar, BTC PRINS) and an open source SCADA interface based on OpenKonsquenz requirements.
The industrial and open-source SCADA system are integrated to real-time and offline (co-) simulation platform at SESA-lab (also through mosaic) which provides the capability of interfacing the SCADA to “virtual grid” and therefor possibility of testing SCADA for different operational scenarios.
The research directions around the SCADA infrastructure replica are, not limited to: