Novel Simulation Approaches for Smart Grids

Eleftherios Tsampasis,Lambros Sarakis,Theodore Zahariadis,Helen Leligou,John Garofalakis

doi:10.3390/jsan5030011

Eleftherios Tsampasis, Lambros Sarakis + Show 3 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3390/jsan5030011

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Journal: Journal of Sensor and Actuator Networks	Publication Date: Jun 29, 2016
Citations: 53	License type: CC BY 4.0

Affiliation: University of Patras

Abstract

The complexity of the power grid, in conjunction with the ever increasing demand for electricity, creates the need for efficient analysis and control of the power system. The evolution of the legacy system towards the new smart grid intensifies this need due to the large number of sensors and actuators that must be monitored and controlled, the new types of distributed energy sources that need to be integrated and the new types of loads that must be supported. At the same time, integration of human-activity awareness into the smart grid is emerging and this will allow the system to monitor, share and manage information and actions on the business, as well as the real world. In this context, modeling and simulation is an invaluable tool for system behavior analysis, energy consumption estimation and future state prediction. In this paper, we review current smart grid simulators and approaches for building and user behavior modeling, and present a federated smart grid simulation framework, in which building, control and user behavior modeling and simulation are decoupled from power or network simulators and implemented as discrete components. This framework enables evaluation of the interactions between the communication infrastructure and the power system taking into account the human activities, which are at the focus of emerging energy-related applications that aim to shape user behavior. Validation of the key functionality of the proposed framework is also presented.

Highlights

Any smart city aspires to provide a clean, economic and safe environment in which to live, work and play, and relies on the orchestration of energy, water, transportation, public health, safety and other key services to offer an improved quality of life to its citizens
We focus on open simulation tools that can be exploited to study the smart grid operation taking into account the interaction between the user and the system, and to test different algorithms for the control of the building and of the smart grid, exploiting elaborate building energy performance models
By including Powerfactory, Virtual Grid Integration Laboratory (VirGIL) is able to address transient simulations, which is not the case for FNCS and GridSpice. This type of simulation is supported in EPOCHS, which is no longer being actively maintained. ‚ In the case of federated systems, heterogeneous technologies for the component interconnection infrastructure have been used. All of these technologies exploit the publish/subscribe communication paradigm for data exchange, they are based on different software (e.g., FNCS is based on ZeroMQ, GridSpice on RePast Simphony and VirGIL on Ptolemy II communication framework for distributed simulations). ‚ There are different approaches regarding the integration of the control logic into the simulation components

Summary

Introduction

Any smart city aspires to provide a clean, economic and safe environment in which to live, work and play, and relies on the orchestration of energy, water, transportation, public health, safety and other key services to offer an improved quality of life to its citizens. Smart grids are complex systems and their management and optimization are challenging tasks To operate their infrastructures efficiently, transmission and distribution network operators use sophisticated management systems including Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA), DMS (Distribution Management System), OMS (Outage Management System), DSM (Demand Side Management) and EMS (Energy Management System). Such systems can be used in a stand-alone fashion or, in case they are used for the management of the distribution grid, combined into integrated ADMS (Advanced Distribution Management System) platforms. The ADMS, which at least integrates SCADA, DMS and OMS, provides functionality for system status monitoring, analysis (e.g., load flow calculations, state estimation), operation (e.g., switch management, load shedding, fault management, service restoration), optimization (e.g., Volt-Var control, distribution network reconfiguration, feeder balancing, demand response), planning (e.g., load forecasting, optimal placement of capacitor banks for reactive power compensation) and simulation [1,2,3]

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