Stability and Accuracy Analysis of a Digital Real-Time Co-simulation Infrastructure

Over the last few years, real-time simulation has captured more and more interest due to the raised demand for testing hardware in the real world. Such a system allows us to operate the software model copied from the physical system at the rate of the natural world to reproduce the behaviour of the hardware counterpart in the real world. In addition, the simulation systems can run with discrete, constant time steps within the range of several $mu s$. The real-time simulation has different time constraints depending on the application method or requirements of the target. Several innovative multiprocessor architectures have been designed and innovated to achieve this goal. Among them, The Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) and IBM Power8 are considered handy tools to guarantee the hardware acceleration for the EMT analysis to meet the requirements of the time-step constraint. The functionalities of the component can be estimated through the Power Hardware-In-the-Loop method in less dangerous circumstances. However, the disadvantage of DRTS is on the computation side, where the DRTS must operate a specific EMT model in detail. As a result, the accuracy of the power systems might not be guaranteed as the scale of the methods is increasing. One method to solve that problem is a co-simulation scenario. Co-simulation involves the integration of physical, software, and network factors into really complex designed systems. Because of external demand, the growth of these systems must be concurrent and distributed, i.e., divided among many teams and/or external suppliers, every with their domain and set of tools. It can allow the Hardware-the-Loop (HIL) to test and validate big and complex power system scenarios without endangering costly equipment or compromising power system dependability. Nevertheless, Although the co-simulation overcame the limitations surrounding individual capabilities of real-time laboratories, it gives us some new challenges, mainly on the time synchronization time and low speed of the dynamics performance, accuracy, and stability for distributed real-time digital simulation. In this dissertation, the literature background related to DRTS has been reviewed and analyzed. After that, we build a Co-simulation system using the DRTS platform and the Aurora 8B/10B communication standard. This enables the study of System-of-Systems (SoS) that are themselves sophisticated and hybrid, yielding numerical phenomena and artifacts that have only been superficially explored and understood until now. We explore the effects of IEEE 1588 Precision Time Protocol (PTP) synchronization using time and frequency-domain analysis. Positively, they demonstrate that numerical stability can be preserved even in intricate system configurations, which is promising. More and more renewable energy is being generated with inverters, and this trend necessitates research on EMT systems of grander scale and interconnected. This study provides insight into the processes associated with such sophisticated DRTS co-simulation environments.