Study of co-simulation methods applied in power systems (Part II): MAPNET and real time HIL platform

Modern power systems have been developed toward the direction of complexity and intelligence, which will result in new challenges in the field of simulation. Conventional simulation methods cannot meet the analytical needs of practical large-scale power systems. Thus numerical co-simulation is considered as an alternative to analytical methods for its features on the best exploitation of discipline specific simulators. This paper addressed two co-simulation methods, which integrate two or three kinds of software or hardware to realize the capability of multi-physical simulation. One method adopted MAPNET, which integrated Matlab and OPNET to realize co-simulation. The application of MAPNET in agent-based power system stabilizing control was presented as a case study. The other method adopted a real time co-simulation platform, which consisted of a real time digital simulator (RTDS), a digital signal processor (DSP) cluster, a personal computer (PC) cluster and power hardware in the loop (HIL) interface. Each part of the real time co-simulation platform was introduced. The simulations of wind farms and home energy systems were tested as case studies with this real time co-simulation platform. The proposed two co-simulation platforms in this paper can be used as effective tools for designing modern power systems.