Stability and Accuracy Analysis of a Real-time Co-simulation Infrastructure

Co-simulation techniques are gaining popularity amongst the power system research community to analyse future scalable Smart Grid solutions. However, complications such as multiple communication protocols, uncertainty in latencies are holding-up the widespread usage of these techniques for power system analysis. These issues are even further exacerbated when applied to Digital Real-Time Simulations (DRTS) with strict real-time constraints for Power Hardware-In-the-Loop (PHIL) tests. In this paper, we thoroughly test and demonstrate an innovative co-simulation infrastructure that allows to interconnect different DRTS through the Aurora 8B/10B protocol to reduce the effects of communication latency and respect real-time constraints. The Ideal Transformer Method Interface Algorithm (ITM IA), commonly used in PHIL applications, is used to interface the DRTS. Finally, we present time-domain and frequency-domain accuracy analyses on the obtained experimental results to demonstrate the potential of the proposed infrastructure.