Enhancing Grid Resilience: Islanding Control in a Digital Twin of Real Electrical Distribution System

Digital Twin (DT) technology creates a digital counterpart of a physical system or process, facilitating instantaneous monitoring, analysis, and simulation. When applied to an Electrical Distribution System (EDS), DT enables continuous analysis by merging static and dynamic data, which illustrates the present condition of the grid and forecasts future scenarios for the Distribution System Operator (DSO), as well as for producers and consumers. It also provides the ability to simulate various hypothetical situations for DSOs. The current work is an extension of a previously published journal paper that discusses the architecture of the Smart Grid Controller (SGC) application and the developed tools within it for Smart Recursive Load Flow (SRLF) calculation, aiming to estimate the loads in Medium Voltage (MV) feeders. The SGC application was designed to be integrated with the Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition System (SCADA) of any EDS to facilitate the development of DT. This paper focuses on the development of the Islanding Control tool within the SGC application, presenting a control scheme for robust management and control of split grids. The islanding trigger entails specific instructions from the mainland system operator, deliberate disconnection maneuvers, and handling cascading failures in response to potential risks. This paper demonstrates the effectiveness of the developed Islanding Control tool, which was evaluated on an actual EDS.