Distributed and Reconfigurable Communication System for Open Source Real-Time Simulations of Power Systems

Hardware for real-time simulations of power systems is often highly specialized, proprietary, inflexible, and expensive. A consequence is that many systems have low interoperability, are not conducive to innovation, are not extensible, and are inaccessible to many researchers and small companies. While there have been efforts to build open source real-time simulation software, there is a lack of an open implementation of the infrastructure that facilitates interconnecting the hardware and software components of a real-time simulation. In this article, we present an open source implementation of a communication system that empowers real-time simulation software to be used in cosimulations and hardware-in-the-loop simulations that require simulation equipment, measurement devices, and power system hardware to be interconnected using real-time capable communication channels. The system is designed to enable hassle-free reconfiguration without the need for physical rewiring, even when simulation components are distributed across different locations. We show the applicability by connecting the system to the open source simulation software DPsim and performing a latency benchmark, a cosimulation, and a power hardware-in-the-loop simulation. Our results show that our system is capable of achieving a time step of$\text{5} \,\mu {\text{s}}$and thus has a performance similar to that of commercial real-time simulators. Our communication system is based on established standards and is interoperable with many protocols and data formats. Other researchers can therefore use our system as a basis for interfacing arbitrary components to real-time simulations.