An Immersive Virtual Reality Training Game for Power Substations Evaluated in Terms of Usability and Engagement

Safety-focused training is essential for the operation and maintenance concentrated on the reliability of critical infrastructures, such as power grids. This paper introduces and evaluates a system for power substation operational training by exploring and interacting with realistic models in virtual worlds using serious games. The virtual reality (VR) simulator used building information modelling (BIM) from a 115 kV substation to develop a scenario with high technical detail suitable for professional training. This system created interactive models that could be explored using a first-person-perspective serious game in a cave automatic virtual environment (CAVE). Different operational missions could be carried out in the serious game, allowing several skills to be coached. The suitability for vocational training carried out by utility companies was evaluated in terms of usability and engagement. The evaluation used a System Usability Scale (SUS) and a Game Engagement Questionnaire (GEQ) filled by 16 power substation operators demonstrating marginally acceptable usability, with improvement opportunities and high acceptance (by utility technicians) of this system for operation training focused on safety in such hazardous tasks.

GIS-Analysis Of The Ural Power Grid Vulnerability To The Impact Of Sleet And Wind

In this paper, we describe an experiment of complex power grid structure and wind and sleet mapping of territory using two different network indices: standard edge betweenness centrality and new author’s index – electrical grid centrality. Such analysis of the network allows to identify power lines with high load which could be vulnerable elements of the power grid. It is very important for strategic planning of power grids to reduce the risk of accidents by distributing loads across several lines so that they will be able to reserve each other. As a case territory for this research, we took the Ural united power system in Russia which is greatly exposed to different sleet and wind according to the statistics of the power grid operator. The degree of natural hazard consequences could be compensated by the network structure through alternative paths of energy supply or vice versa – increased if they are absent. At the same time, in this paper we consider that power grids have their own features from the graph theory point of view, for example multiple (parallel) edges, branches, different types of vertices. The existing index of edge betweenness centrality does not perfectly cope with them. We compare two indices characterizing power line importance within the system – betweenness centrality and electrical grid centrality and analyze the network structure features together with the spatial distribution of sleet and wind. As a result, we could identify bottlenecks in the study network. According to this study the most vulnerable power lines were detected, for example 500 kV Iriklinskaya CHP – Gazovaya and 500 kV Yuzhnouralskaya CHP-2 – Shagol power lines, that supply big cities such as Chelyabinsk and Orenburg and a bunch of industries around them.

Securing SDN-Enabled Smart Power Grids

Software-defined networking (SDN) provides flexibility in controlling, managing, and dynamically reconfiguring the distributed heterogeneous smart grid networks. Considerably less attention has been received to provide security in SDN-enabled smart grids. Centralized SDN controller protects smart grid networks against outside attacks only. Furthermore, centralized SDN controller suffers from a single point of compromise and failure which is detrimental to security and reliability. This chapter presents a framework with multiple SDN controllers and security controllers that provides a secure and robust smart grid architecture. The proposed framework deploys a local IDS to provide security in a substation. Whereas a global IDS is deployed to provide security in control center and overall smart grid network, it further verifies the consequences of control-commands issued by SDN controller and SCADA master. Performance comparison and simulation result show that the proposed framework is efficient as compared to existing security frameworks for SDN-enabled smart grids.

Decentralized Energy Management System Enhancement for Smart Grid

In these last decades, electrical power grids become more intelligent. Hence, sophisticated software and hardware were introduced to the power grid, which makes it a smart grid. This chapter is an introduction on smart-grid technology; thus, microgrids are explained, and the use of multiagent system in centralized/decentralized energy management systems are discussed and compared. Smart agents are an emerging technology for decentralized computation and data storage. Hence, in this chapter, decentralized energy management system is created basing on multi-agent system technique where sources and loads are considered as separated agents each of them. After that, these sources and load create a microgrid and each microgrid can be considered as an agent. The work proposes an approach for load supplying optimization to decrease the microgrid cost and enhance its efficiency.

Safety and Security beyond Industry 4.0

As open standards like OPC UA were introduced to facilitate the interoperability of devices, safety and security standards were only gradually incorporated into Industry 4.0 designs. Hence, safety and security issues have eventually emerged with the growing complexity of such systems, and they need to expand outside of their premises to be integrated into larger set-ups. Typical examples thereof are power grids, whose dependability was guarded for long times by strict rules and restrictive communication protocols. Once they were exposed on the Internet, however, their vulnerability has increased to a point where their safety could be compromised. Hence, there is an urgent need to implement effective safety and security mechanisms into OPC UA to provide systems with appropriate levels of functional safety as well as data security. With increasing levels of integration, e.g. with Industry 5.0, these standards need to evolve to provide for sustainability in a globally interconnected world.

Types of smart systems and their application in power grids

With the development of modern technologies, opportunities for an exchange of the increasing amount of information at ever higher speeds are created. The use of smart systems in electric power engineering creates conditions for improving the systems for monitoring, archiving, analysis and management. It is necessary to collect the basic information about the emergency modes automatically for analysis of the operation of the equipment and the parameters of the regimes in the power grids. The main questions to be decided are: what type of information is needed, how to use this information and at what are the different access levels, what should be the systems - local or global, how to exchange data. Smart systems for power grids and switchgears have been developed on a modular basis by almost all global manufacturers, as well as by many companies on individual assignments. The publication discusses the existing types of smart systems and the data they process. Suggestions have been made for the volume and structure of data that are needed for the analysis process.