Abstract
This report presents a successful technical learning integration of student interns in the Advanced Protection Laboratory space, located in the Grid Research Integration and Deployment Center (GRID-C) at the Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). The Advanced Protection Laboratory was created for the primary goal of supporting DOE’s research projects and technical staff at ORNL. As a secondary goal, the space was used for collaborating with ORNL’s intern programs, providing support to the lab’s mentors and student interns. In 2024, three student interns spent a summer in the Advanced Protection lab space and were involved in the DarkNet Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) project. The students had a great opportunity to gain hands-on experience with communication and protective relay equipment focused on information technology, data analytics, and cybersecurity. Experiences in the lab space with real equipment and software integration offer education and professional development for students, which is especially important because of a need in the energy industry to recruit highly skilled power and communication engineers.
This report also covers the interns’ exploratory activities and some of their results. They focused on three principal areas of interest and developed prototype implementations for these activities: (1) Enhancements to Networking in Testbed, (2) Automation Framework for Experiments, and (3) Preparing Datasets. The unifying theme behind the activities is to create an automated workflow. Enhancements are made to the testbed so that more accurate experiments can be performed. The purposes of the automation framework are to perform experiments more efficiently and to produce raw data. Finally, automation through scripting curates and collates raw data to create labeled datasets for research and academic purposes that can include machine learning and Artificial Intelligence (AI).
