A Coordinator-Event-Axis-Based Time Synchronization Strategy for Cyber-Physical Power System Co-Simulation

The emerging Cyber-Physical Power System Co-Simulation (CPPSCS) can integrate isolated power, cyber, and control simulators to explore the interaction mechanism of energy and information flows. However, one of the most critical challenges of CPPSCS is to properly settle the time synchronization between the continuous and discrete systems. The Global-event-axis-based Time Synchronization (GlobalTS) strategy requires registering all simulation events of continuous and discrete system simulation processes into the global event axis to advance CPPSCS uniformly. This strategy introduces a series of efficiency challenges, including event registration, maintenance, and execution, especially for large-scale co-simulation scenarios. Hence, this paper proposes a Coordinator-event-axis-based Time Synchronization (CoordTS) strategy to significantly reduce the number of events that need to be handled by the global scheduler, thus efficiently advancing co-simulation without losing simulation accuracy. Also, this paper demonstrates a pilot implementation of the CoordTS strategy to detail how to utilize the proposed strategy in practical co-simulation scenarios. Experiments on a series of typical co-simulation scenarios show that CoordTS can improve the co-simulation speed by 10 to 30 times compared to the conventional GlobalTS strategy. Furthermore, the scalability verification on the IEEE 118-bus and the PEGASE 1354-bus test systems indicates that CoordTS is applicable for large-scale co-simulation scenarios.