Nowadays, power systems’ Protection, Automation, and Control (PAC) functionalities are often deployed in different constrained devices (Intelligent Electronic Devices) following a coupled hardware/software design. However, with the increase in distributed energy resources, more customized controllers will be required. These devices have high operational and deployment costs with long development, testing, and complex upgrade cycles. Addressing these challenges requires that a ’revolution’ in power system PAC design takes place. Decoupling from hardware-dependent implementations by virtualizing the functionalities facilitates the transition from a traditional power grid into a software-defined smart grid. This article presents a survey of recent literature on software-defined PAC for power systems, covering the concepts, main academic works, industrial proof of concepts, and the latest standardization efforts in this rising area. Finally, we summarize the expected future technical, industrial, and standardization challenges and open research problems. It was observed that software-defined PAC systems have a promising potential that can be leveraged for future PAC and smart grid developments. Moreover, standardizations in virtual IED software development and deployments, configuration tools, performance benchmarking, and compliance testing using a dynamic, agile approach assuring interoperability are critical enablers.

As power system's operational technology converges with innovative information and communication technologies, the need for extensive resilience testing for scenarios covering the electrical grid, networking bottlenecks, as well as cyber security threats, become a necessity. This paper proposes a comprehensive, multi-disciplinary simulation framework to test virtualized intelligent electronic devices (vIEDs), considering 1) functional requirements, 2) performance and quality of service of the underlying communication network using software-defined networking, and 3) cyber security intrusion detection schemes. This work serves as a reference for researchers interested in the grid modernization of information and communication infrastructure for future power systems. Six different cyber security attack surfaces have been identified within the framework scope. It was observed that migration of vIEDs due to device maintenance or external anomalies is interesting from an operational perspective yet still poses significant security threats. Therefore, both host-based and network-based intrusion detection schemes were analyzed. Also, the setup has been mapped to an offshore wind case study demonstrating its potential and possible scenarios to simulate.