may have the potential to migrate non-mission-critical substation automation from native-specific hardware platforms to virtual machines or even cloud-native containerized applications. Figure 10 provides the architecture of an advanced automation application system that allows a real-time operating system with a non-real-time Internet of Things operating system using virtual machine architecture. The hypervisor allows scalable multi-core CPU cores and execution of real-time grid logic along with a non-time-critical humanmachine interface type of application. The advanced software-defined substation automation system shown in Figure 11 is using container-based architecture and a secure edge operating system lighter than typical virtual machines in terms of footprint and memory usage. They boot faster and use fewer resources than virtual machines. They can be deployed seamlessly across development, validation, and production and are easily portable across One Central Relay for a Switchgear/Substation Each MU/PIU Takes Two Sets of Current and Voltage MU320 Tx1 MU320 Tx2 Alarms and Events MU320 MU320 MU320 MU320 MU320 MU320 Single Line Point-to-Point Connections Trending Centralized Protection Auto Alarm and Events: Visual, Aural, Email SLD Shows All Bays on One Screen, With Fault Location Transformer and 12 Bays of Feeder Protection/Control figure 8. A centralized protection and control system. Trending Gives Warning of Impending Problems Automatic Waveform Collection; Review From Desk Waveforms VM Container App A App B App C Bins/Libs Host OS Hardware Native App A App B App C Bins/Libs Bins/Libs Bins/Libs Guest OS Guest OS Guest OS Hardware Hypervisor Virtual Machines figure 9. Software-defined grid controller architectures. 90 ieee power & energy magazine April 2022 Show Issue App A App B App C Bins/Libs Bins/Libs Bins/Libs Docker Hardware Hypervisor Containers