Distribution grids are becoming more decentralized with the increasing penetration of renewable energy resources such as storages, electrical vehicles and renewable energy resources. IEC 61850 is the dominant standard for engineering substation automation systems and the scope is traditionally within the Local Area Network. The scope has since extended to include wide area networks and cybersecurity is now a system requirement that is becoming a must-have. We propose EASy-RM, a requirement management framework for Energy Automation Systems that can trace cybersecurity requirements from requirements (IEC 62443) to specifications (IEC 61850) and to the automation control (IEC 61499). The underlying framework is based on graph theory for formally linking requirements and system artefacts, and graph algorithms over these links are used for requirement management activities. Our results are demonstrated on a CIGRE case study where we demonstrate the tracing of IEC 62443 authentication requirements to IEC 61850 specifications and IEC 61499 implementation.

This paper proposes a novel AI agent for reasoning, planning, and testing industrial automation applications. The AI agent accepts operator instructions in natural language and performs semantic reasoning over functional requirements to generate an optimized cost-effective action plan. This plan comprises a sequence of executable actions that can be deployed in industrial control systems (ICS) to enable efficient and sustainable machine operation. Then the AI agent automates the testing of control systems by comparing the agent’s planned and executed actions against expected outputs, ensuring requirement conformance and enhancing system reliability. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the AI agent in generating sustainable operational plans and validating control system behavior for laboratory scale case studies, underscoring its potential in the future of intelligent industrial automation.

In smaller components of industrial or energy automation systems, such as device controllers of Protection and Control (PAC) systems in smart grids, controller functionality is tightly coupled with the physical device or sensor capabilities. At this level, software is small and therefore easy to maintain and test. However, when multiple controllers are interconnected and higher-level functionality is added, software applications grow exponentially, and ensuring maintainability becomes proportionally challenging. In this paper, we extend the IEC 61499 reference architecture used to develop industrial automation software with the principles of Abstraction Layered Architecture (ALA) that has shown up to 400% improvements in industrial software maintainability. We show that even a light application of abstraction layering on the top, application-level of IEC 61499 applications makes them significantly more readable and slightly more maintainable. More concrete gains in maintainability are expected when abstraction layering is integrated into lower layers.

IEC61850 is a core enabling standard for the digitalization of the substation with standardized communication protocols for transmitting data within the substation. GOOSE message is a peer-to-peer messaging service for time-critical event messaging. GOOSE messages were extended in IEC61850-90-5 to routable GOOSE, allowing messages to be transmitted outside the substations in a Wide Area Network (WAN) such as 5G, which offers higher security, higher reliability and lower delays than previous mobile standards and opens an environment for wider outreach of substations in Distributed Protection & Control Schemes (DPACS) applications. In the paper, we evaluate the latency of sending IEC61850 R-GOOSE event messages over the public and private 5G networks in Sweden. Preliminary results indicate that the Local Break Out (LBO) latency is acceptable for DAPCS applications such as Fault Location, Isolation and Service Restoration (FLISR), selectivity and Phasor Measurement Units (PMU) transmission.

Information is a key component of progress. Industry 4.0, and especially the future Industry 5.0, is closely related to the topic of the Digital Twin, where virtual components interact with each other. The main advantage of such a system is that it can fully mimic the behaviour of the complicated system, including various unexpected perturbations such as noise, jitter, delays, etc. Thus, the ability to create complex models and run them in real-time is a basic need for extending the Digital Twin. One of the major problems in the development of digital twins is the increasing complexity of the models. Therefore, large processing capacities and parallel computation become critical. The field-programmable gate array (FPGA) is a type of hardware that best fits this task. The FPGA-in-the-loop (FiL) can be considered as the container for running the Digital-Twin model. The transformation of a digital model into FiL is known and used by many companies at this time. However, the authors found that there are no publicly available model-to-FiL transformation methods. In this paper, the authors aim to fill this gap. We first discuss the major design challenges of a FiL system and provide recommendations to overcome them in the form of a road map. We then demonstrate a step-by-step process for converting a simple MATLAB/SIMULINK model to a FiL system using the proposed road map. Finally, we will demonstrate the validation process of the designed FiL systems and prove that they are running in real-time.

The wide propagation of electric vehicle (EV) charging infrastructure integrated into the energy distribution network poses numerous challenges for the engineering and control of the latter: the load dynamic characteristics become more unsteady, requiring more advanced control, predictions, and virtual commissioning. One step toward the automation of the design and simulation of new charging stations can be reached through the integration of the EV-specific standards and protocols with other widely spread electrical standards, thereby, improving the compatibility between standards, increasing the reuse of the intelligent work results, and promoting the development of EVs’ infrastructure. A method for virtual commissioning of electrical charging stations is proposed, implemented, and tested in a form of a software tool in which the electrical system description from the widely used IEC 61850 standard is used as an input. The designed tool builds a digital twin of the charging station that consists of its Simulink model as well as two automatically generated communication code primitives using the open charge point protocol for control and management purposes over the autogenerated model. The generated digital twin can be used for virtual commissioning purposes. The application of the method is illustrated in a case study.

Data centres are becoming an increasingly important part of our society’s infrastructure. The number of data centres is growing constantly, making growing the gross level of electrical energy consumption. At the same time, the rapid spread of sophisticated electrical devices as well as other automation systems, in general, produces an opportunity for making data centres an attractive player in the constantly designing energy market. But for this, new advanced technologies must be applied to solve the problems of complexity and heterogeneity in various types of data centre design. A new concept, which is based on the automated generation of a digital twin (DT) system, is directly from its schematic representations presented in this paper. A DT is a virtual version of an object or system, designed to aid decision-making and virtual commissioning through simulation, machine learning, and reasoning. In the scope of current work, the IEC 61850 standard is chosen as a starting point for a multi-step generation of the DT combining simulation model and decentralized control logic. As a result, the designed DT “clone” of an electrical system consists of the SIMULINK model of the electrical system plus the automatically generated control application (based on the IEC 61499 standard).