Enabling Digital Twins for Smart Substation Networks.

The smart grid improves the traditional power grid by providing communication networks for real-time monitoring and control. Testbeds are commonly used to experiment with new smart grid scenarios, but the high cost of commercial devices poses a challenge. Digital Twins (DTs) are replicas of components, devices, or systems, facilitating research, validation, optimization, and real-time remote monitoring. This paper introduces DT-Smart, a solution for creating DTs of digital substation networks. DT-Smart differentiates from previous work as most smart grid DTs are used for remote monitoring, while ours is used for validation. Other studies that use DTs for validation do not document the DT-building process, which makes the DT hard to replicate. A testbed was set up to evaluate DT-Smart, replicating an overcurrent scenario with commercial devices. Experiments with the DT show successful replication of the physical scenario, generating the same network frames and producing the same results as the physical testbed.