Cross-Platform Comparison of Standard Power System Components used in Real Time Simulation

Real-time simulators are an essential tool for the development of new cyber physical power system applications, specially in development and testing of smart grid functionalities. Like in many other fields of research, one of the major challenges when using simulation is that of reproducibility results. This problem becomes even more complex for the case of real time simulation when different simulation targets (i.e. hardware platforms) are considered. In this paper, comparisons between two simulators with different hardware architectures are presented. The targets compared are Opal-RT real time simulators with Intel Xeon quad-core processors and Kintex 7 FPGAs, and the Typhoon HIL 603 simulator with a combination of ARM R-class processors and Xilinx Virtex 6 FPGAs. For this comparison, standard power system components were implemented in these two environments, and simulation results from test models were compared. The current study reports the discrepancies and similarities between from the results obtained using the two platforms, and proposes a practical approach to reduce the differences found between results from both platforms. The work herein provides evidence on the need for the use of open standards for model exchange suitable for real time simulation.