Distributed simulation for power system analysis including shipboard systems

Abstract

Power systems are distributed in nature. Often they can be divided into sections or groups and treated separately. Terrestrial power systems are divided into separate utilities and are controlled by different regional transmission organization (RTO). Each RTO has detailed data for the area under its control, but only limited data and boundary measurements of the external network. Additionally, shipboard power systems may be divided into sections where local information is kept but not distributed to other parts of the system. Thus, performing a comprehensive power system analysis in such a case is challenging. Also, simulating a large-scale power system with detailed modeling of the components causes a heavy computational burden. One possible way of relieving this problem is to decouple the network into subsystems and solve the subsystems respectively, and then combine the results of the subsystems to get the solution. The way to decouple the network and represent the missing part will affect the result greatly. Also, due to information distribution in the dispatch or data centers, a problem of doing power system analysis with limited available data arises. The equivalent for other networks needs to be constructed to analyze the power system. In this paper, a distributed simulation algorithm is proposed to handle the issues above. A history of distributed simulation is briefly introduced. A generalized coupling method dealing with natural coupling is proposed. Distributed simulation models are developed and demonstrated in the virtual test bed (VTB). The models are tested with different network configurations. The test results are presented and analyzed. The performance of the distributed simulation is compared with the steady state and time domain simulation results.