Low-cost integration of hardware components into co-simulation for future power and energy systems

The complexity of energy systems is increasing continuously. The main driver for this is the number of components and systems that are involved in grid operation, optimization, and protection. Moreover, various interconnections among different components exist so that the behavior of one has impacts on many. This raises the requirement to thoroughly test and validate components and systems to be integrated in the overall infrastructure. In order to address the dependencies it is not sufficient to apply stand-alone approaches but to follow co-simulation. Furthermore, hard- and software have to be combined to large-scale simulation scenarios. Thus, real laboratory components have to be connected and integrated with software-based simulations. In this paper the authors present a low-cost and standard-compliant co-simulation approach that integrates controllers for real hardware devices with software simulators through the mosaik framework.