Power System Simulation Based On Open Software Platform For Large-scale Power Systems

Great progresses in power system digital simulation have been made in the last halfcentury due to the ever-increasing computer hardware capability and the development ofsoftware technologies, mainly including numerical computation of large-scale sparse matrix,high level programming languages and computer graphics. Increasing electronic devices suchas FACTs are installed in power systems. Meanwhile, the major countries in the world areworking actively to promote the development of renewable energy (mainly wind and solarpower). In such a context, power system simulation are facing with great challenges, whichcan be summarized into four folds:1) adequate flexibility of power system model extensionor customization is required to model new devices or models accurately;2) capability offast(near-real-time or real-time) simulation of large-scale power systems is missing foreffective system monitoring and control;3) existing simulation algorithms cannot be easilyextended to better adapt to new models and/or scenario;4)under the smart grid circumstance,traditional power systems and information systems together form a cyber-physicalsystems(CPS). The interaction between information systems and power systems should beconsidered and the dynamic characteristics of the whole CPS need to be simulated andanalyzed. That means power system simulation becomes only one part of the whole process,and which in turn, from a high-level, requires power system simulation software are openenough to integrate with other simulation tools.The models and algorithms of most of the existing commercial power system simulationsoftware are hard to extend, in addition, the software themselves are suffered frominflexibility to adapt to latest computer hardware architectures and technologies, due tolimitations originated from legacy code and relatively out-dated implementation techniques.These make them insufficient to meet the demand and challenges of power systems at presentand in the near foreseeable future. Considering the modern software development approachand latest technologies, an open software platform is proposed in this thesis based on theInterPSS project, as a possible and practical solution to meet the demand and challengesmentioned above. The proposed platform has the following features:1) the simulationplatform is built upon the Spring framework, featured with open and loosely-decoupledsoftware architecture and clear power system simulation core engine. Advanced functionalmodules are developed based on the core engine.2) A consistent power system modelingframework based on Eclipse Modeling Framework (EMF).3) Decomposition betweenalgorithms and models.4) Open data interface based on the Open Data Model (ODM) facilitates the input and output operations of various types of simulation data.Based on the platform, power system model and simulation algorithm extension are alsoanalyzed. First, models for optimization application are formed based on existing models forload flow through object-oriented programming (OOP) extension and compositionmechanisms. ADC-OPF program is developed through the integration of QuadprogJ, an opensource quadratic programming solver. Second, as a demonstration of algorithm extension, ancontinuous power flow program is developed through extending InerPSS jacobian matrix andits power flow analysis framework.There work verify that its simulation core engine can beflexibly extended in both model and algorithm aspects.The open architecture and relatively independent core engine of InterPSS make itadaptable to different hardware platforms. A cloud computing simulation platform is builtby deploying InterPSS core engine to Google App Engine (GAE), testifying its goodtransportability. Some primary functional and performance tests are performed, showing thatweb-service oriented cloud computing platforms, such as GAE, are insufficient to meet needsof the complex computation arising from power system simulation. Last, application prospectof cloud computing in power system simulation is discussed.The new generation CPUs have adopted the multi-core architecture, however, theexisting power system simulation softwares are unable to fully explore the computingcapability of multi-cores, due to the fact that they was developed for uniprocessor architectureand serially implemented. A parallel simulation module upon InterPSS platform for multiplestudy cases has been developed based on the Java Fork/Join Framework, and applied forpower system N-1security analysis. Tests were performed with a United EuropeanTransmission Connection(UETC) system, showing that a good parallelism was achieved withthe module.