ICT gateway to simulation environment for electrical fault injection and recovery

Due to the advancements in the smart grid technologies, smart mechanisms are required within the Energy Management System (EMS) environments for microgrids. One of the functionalities of EMS is to ensure grid stability. In order to test and validate new mechanisms, appropriate simulation tools exist. Most of the existing validation strategies include modeling the target system in simulation environment and then deploying the mechanism in the real environment. When the validated mechanisms are implemented in real environment, they often do not work as intended and require modification due to the implementation difference within the EMS controller. An EMS should be able to communicate with the simulated model, inject faults in the simulated model and able to perform various control actions. In this paper, we propose a software-in-loop approach, where the grid stability mechanisms are implemented in the EMS, which is deployed in the real environment. EMS must operate exactly the way it does in the simulation environment. For such a capability, the simulation platform should be able to communicate with the EMS. In this work, we consider a 13-node radial distribution grid with one solar panel as a generation unit. The 13-node distribution grid has been modeled using Apros simulation software. SMG2.0, a software application for microgrid is used to monitor, inject electrical faults and trigger recovery mechanisms in the Apros model. A communication architecture called ICT gateway has been developed between Apros and the EMS (SMG2.0). Two fault scenarios (line-breakage and under-voltage) are considered as the fault injection scenarios to evaluate the performance of the communication architecture. When the SMG2.0 detects a line fault, it triggers network reconfiguration as the recovery strategy for the line-breakage scenario in the simulation environment. This approach not only helps in designing fault handling strategies in the electrical network but also helps in designing an effective software application targeted to control the physical entities.