Ensaios em Sistemas Virtuais de Proteção, Automação e Controle vPAC: A Nova Era dos Testes Digitais

At the National Seminar on Electric Power Production and Transmission (SNTPEE 2025), engineer Paulo Sérgio Pereira Júnior, from Conprove, presented the technical paper “Tests in Virtual Protection, Automation and Control Systems (vPAC)”, addressing the advances, challenges, and test methodologies applied to this new generation of virtualized protection systems. The presentation provided an evolutionary analysis of protection systems, from electromechanical and static relays to microprocessor-based and virtual relays (vIEDs), demonstrating how the electrical sector is moving towards the complete digitalization and virtualization of substations. 🧠 Evolution of protection and automation: The presentation contextualizes the technological transition — from physical to virtual relays — and highlights the importance of interoperability, communication via IEC 61850, and integration with intelligent test sets. Virtualization represents a new paradigm, in which software assumes the central role previously occupied by hardware. ⚙️ Architecture and Virtualization Mechanisms: The Tier 1 and Tier 2 hypervisor and container models were explained, detailing their differences in efficiency, performance, and security. While the Tier 1 hypervisor offers greater direct access to hardware and stability, the use of containers (such as Docker and Podman) ensures portability, lightweight design, and scalability—ideal characteristics for virtualized protection applications. Virtual relays (vIEDs), implemented on servers, interact via IEC 61850 protocols (GOOSE, Sampled Values, PTP, MMS), allowing for centralized and hardware-agnostic protection, a fundamental characteristic for the future of digital substations. 🔌 Interoperability and Performance: The work emphasizes that virtualized systems must meet the same traditional requirements of protection systems—selectivity, reliability, simplicity, economy, and speed—but now under new conditions of virtualized network, digital traffic, and time synchronization. 💡 Tests with physical and virtual suitcases: Two testing approaches were compared: • Physical suitcase → used for complete protection chain tests, with analog injection (primary and secondary) and actuation analysis. • Virtual suitcase → executed within the server itself, simulating the injection and reading of digital samples (Sampled Values) and GOOSE commands. Both methods guarantee the validation of the protection chain — from the Merging Unit to the virtual relay — and allow for the analysis of performance, response times, and communication integrity. 📊 Event reproduction and network analysis: Paulo Junior highlighted the use of COMTRADE files (analog transient analysis) and PCAP files (digital traffic capture) for reproduction, simulation, and diagnosis of real events, allowing for precise tests in a virtual environment. The integration of virtual switches, traffic isolation, access control, and the allocation of extra bandwidth for simulations ensure that the digital environment maintains stability and reliability, even during simultaneous injections of simulated and real signals. 🔒 Conclusions and benefits: The article concludes that testing in virtual protection, automation, and control systems represents an inevitable evolution in the electrical sector. Among the main benefits are: • Enhanced safety and reduced operational risk; • Reduced structural and maintenance costs; • Greater flexibility and scalability; • Remote simulation and diagnostic capabilities; • Full integration between engineering, operation, and digital testing. Conprove emphasizes that virtualization requires new tools, planning, and continuous training, but its gains in embedded intelligence, reliability, and efficiency already consolidate vPAC as the future of electrical protection. 🔗 Learn more about Conprove solutions for testing, diagnostics, and virtualization in substations Digital: https://conprove.com/todos-produtos/ https://conprove.com/produto/02-0-ce-... https://conprove.com/produto/03-0-ce-... iec-61850/ https://conprove.com/produto/05-ce-70... https://conprove.com/produto/07-ctc-c... https://conprove.com/produto/07-netwo...