Automatic Reserve Power Switching as a Means of Enhancing the Reliability of Industrial Power Supply

Abstract

Industrial power systems face growing pressure to remain uninterrupted as production lines become more automated and more sensitive to even momentary outages. Automatic reserve power switching, widely known in engineering practice by its Russian-derived acronym ABP, remains one of the most cost-effective safeguards against supply interruption, transferring loads from a failed source to a healthy backup within a window ranging from milliseconds to a few seconds. This paper reviews the operating principles of conventional and fast-acting reserve switching schemes and places them within the broader evolution of substation automation, digital protection, and self-healing distribution networks. Drawing on twenty-two peer-reviewed sources published between 2018 and 2025, the study identifies a persistent gap between generic distribution-level reliability research and the specific switching-time requirements of industrial facilities such as metallurgical plants and continuous-process manufacturing sites. Building on this synthesis, the paper proposes a Criticality-Tiered Reserve Switching framework that matches load criticality categories to an appropriate class of switching technology, synchronization method, and communication protocol. The framework is intended as a decision-support tool for engineers selecting or upgrading reserve switching schemes. The proposed approach also enables engineers to balance switching speed, system complexity, and implementation cost according to the actual consequences of power interruption for each load category. By differentiating protection and redundancy requirements across criticality tiers, the framework can support more efficient allocation of technical resources while maintaining the required level of power-supply reliability. The paper concludes that the reliability benefits promised by digital substation technologies are only realized when switching logic is deliberately matched to process criticality rather than applied uniformly across a facility.