RTCE: Real-Time Co-Emulation Framework for EMT-Based Power System and Communication Network on FPGA-MPSoC Hardware Architecture

With the expansion of smart grid infrastructure world-wide, modeling the interaction between power systems and communication networks becomes paramount and has created a new challenge of co-simulating the two domains before commissioning. Existing co-simulation methods mostly concentrate on the off-line software-level interface design to synchronize messages between the simulators of both domains. Instead of simulating in software with a large latency, this article proposes a novel real-time co-emulation (RTCE) framework on FPGA-MPSoC based hardware architecture for a more practical emulation of real-world cyber-physical systems. The discrete-time based power system electromagnetic transient (EMT) emulation is executed in programmable hardware units so that the transient-level behaviour can be captured in real-time, while the discrete-event based communication network emulation is modeled in abstraction-level or directly executed on the hardware PHY and network ports of the FPGA-MPSoC platform, which can perform the communication networking in real-time. The data exchange between two domains is handled within each platform with an extremely low latency, which is sufficiently fast for real-time interaction; and the multi-board scheme is deployed to practically emulate the communication between different power system areas. The hardware resource cost and emulation latency for the test system and case studies are evaluated to demonstrate the validity and effectiveness of the proposed RTCE framework.