A Cyber-Physical Smart Grid Testbed for Validation of GOOSE-Based Protection Strategies

Although smart grid technologies bring valuable economic, social, and environmental benefits, testing the combination of heterogeneous and co-existing cyber-physical grid structure with legacy technologies presents many challenges. To overcome these challenges without adversely affecting the real-time environment, testbeds are required to explore, develop, evaluate, and validate security controls and protection algorithms in the power system. This paper presents an improved hardware/software design of the smart grid testbed at the Energy Systems Research Laboratory, Florida International University. The hardware/software-based system includes implementing protection and control strategies for power systems with industrial-grade commercial devices to represent the holistic real-time operation of smart power grid. By leveraging resources available at FIU's smart grid testbed, an in-depth experimental analysis is performed to demonstrate and verify the successful operation of the GOOSE publish-subscribe protocol towards the substation protection within the smart grid setup.