Design and application of distributed co‐simulation platform for cyber physical power system based on the concepts of software bus and middleware

Abstract

Due to the complexity and interdependencies in the cyber-physical power system, the co-simulation is a good choice to validate the research and model of the smart grid with existing simulators in different domains. A novel co-simulation platform, LIghtweight Co-simulation of Power and Information and communication technology (ICT) systems for performance Evaluation of smart grid (LICPIE), is developed based on the concepts of software bus and middleware in the study. Compared with other co-simulation platforms, the advantage of LICPIE is that it has a distributed architecture including sub-simulators; management layer based on software bus and middleware, and defines its own standard interface specialist embedded in middleware. The standard interface specialist relieves the limitation of the interface types supported by sub-simulators, which makes the LICPIE more extendible and has wide scope of applications. What's more, benefiting from the distributed architecture and the standard interface specialist, sub-simulators' heterogeneity is avoided and multi-domain simulators could be combined freely according to simulation requirements. An exemplary application is used to describe how sub-simulators with different types of interfaces hang themselves on LICPIE. At last, two co-simulation applications with different combinations of power and ICT systems' simulators show the effectiveness, flexibility and extendibility of the LICPIE.