Enabling Emulation and Evaluation of IEC 61850 Networks With TITAN

Sensing and monitoring electrical signals and power device parameters within the smart grid network infrastructure plays a fundamental role in assessing the smart devices’ proper functioning. Nevertheless, a key challenge for academic teaching and researching purposes is the elevated cost of real electronic devices, such as current and potential transformers, or even intelligent electronic devices. Therefore, traffic emulators are a valuable solution for the evaluation of new smart grid communication proposals. In this work, we propose TITAN, a tool to support the evaluation of automation systems’ communication networks. TITAN enables the emulation of IEC 61850 communication, ranging from data sensing to data acquisition, thus supporting extensive research and development on this fundamental smart grid domain. This tool can interact and communicate with real elements, such as intelligent electronic devices. It enables the emulation of voltage and current data sensing communication, as well as the implementation of different data acquisition schemes by an emulated supervisory system. Our main contributions are: (i) TITAN, a tool with a distributed microservices architecture to execute communication traffic generation tasks; (ii) a user-friendly interface to integrate and manage all components; and (iii) a proof of concept testbed using TITAN and real teleprotection devices. Real case studies using TITAN reveal its feasibility in supporting low-cost testbeds for research, teaching, and testing purposes in sensing and acquisition for automation systems.