This paper was produced for the 2019 NAFEMS World Congress in Quebec Canada

Resource Abstract

Evolution on smart power grid brings new challenges in design to face off as the interoperability across engineering domains, including communications/cyber vs electrical disciplinaries. The design of the smart grid enforces global analysis/optimization of large-scaled size systems (both for large zone and for very detailed models for specific area, e.g. substation, relays with communications protocols), and usage of a variety of simulation software within utilities and academia due to different technological evolution paths and advantages streamed from legacy codes and tools. The proposed approach provides the means to tackle those challenges and enforces the collaboration between the engineering teams by enabling a common and centralized solution. With this project, we introduced InSystemLab (ISL) as a simple and effective means of setting up multi-domains simulation environment with a proper synchronization and numerical stabilization method fully compliant with Functional Mock-up Interface (FMI) standard for co-simulation with enhancement of flexibility of joining co-simulation sessions like the publisher/subscriber approach of the High-Level Architecture (HLA IEEE Std 1516) standard of distributed simulation. The capabilities of the proposed approach are demonstrated on modified power grid benchmarks with addition of wind power plants, relays and communication systems. Because of the complexity of large scaled systems applied to this use case, the proposed solution provided all the required functionalities to demonstrate the distribution of the simulation instances, resulting of the partitioning of large systems, across available computing resources. Dynamic interoperability is demonstrated by coupling various off-the-shelf numerical simulation solutions together through the distributed middleware ISL, namely, EMTP-RV, Hypersim, and OPNet. Combined to a common interface, the proposed solution provides a unique access point to manage all phases, from the setup of the models to the post-processing analysis, of the global simulation platform encouraging a democratization of simulation usage. Moreover, the platform gives the benefits of reusing well tested models and support of experts in their domains because of the usage of native models and original development environment while global study of a system can be conducted for overall optimization purpose, and critical pre-deployment testing. Finally, cyber domain analysis is illustrated by simulating a use case involving an IEC 61850 model of the communication network and its potential impacts on the power grid stability.