Cloud-Edge Architecture With Virtualized Hardware Functionality for Real-Time Diagnosis of Transients in Smart Grids

Edge Cloud is providing unprecedented opportunities for IoT and WAMS (Wide Area Monitoring Systems) in electrical grid operation. It is an orchestrated environment able to address low latency events through appropriate edge-cloud computing configurations. Transient State Estimation (TSE) is a key monitoring tool for capturing a reliable knowledge of the Smart Grid status in real-time, given the impediments introduced by the increasing penetration of Distributed Energy Resources in the energy mix. Frequency response anomalies, large scale transients, and voltage swings can be captured by TSE for real time or post failure data analytics. This work presents a cloud edge framework for the efficient calculation of TSE which, albeit its benefits, demands high computational resources at the edge (close to the measurement units) along with ultra low latency communications. The framework enables TSE as a service through the coordination of Virtual Machines (VMs) running on virtualized infrastructure and other non-virtualized physical nodes. In order to support the stringent time requirements, part of the TSE is offloaded to dedicated hardware acceleration units (FPGA). The proposed TSE framework is validated using an IEEE 30-bus, and the results show a significant superiority in terms of total latency compared to conventional cloud and edge deployments.