Protection leaves the hardware behind
A report from the tutorial of CIGRE study committee B5 at the 2026 Paris session. Three renowned experts — Alex Apostolov (PAC World / OMICRON), Ratan Das (Siemens Energy, convener of the IEEE C37.300 working group) and David MacDonald (GE Grid Automation, convener of CIGRE WG B5.84) — arranged their talks into a single historical sequence: process bus → centralised protection → virtualisation. The protection function turns into a software application, and the server into a computing platform that can be replaced without changing the protection algorithm.