This task force paper summarizes the state-of-the-art real-time digital simulation concepts and technologies that are used for the analysis, design, and testing of the electric power system and its apparatus. This paper highlights the main building blocks of the real-time simulator, i.e., hardware, software, input-output systems, modeling, and solution techniques, interfacing capabilities to external hardware and various applications. It covers the most commonly used real-time digital simulators in both industry and academia. A comprehensive list of the real-time simulators is provided in a tabular review. The objective of this paper is to summarize salient features of various real-time simulators, so that the reader can benefit from understanding the relevant technologies and their applications, which will be presented in a separate paper.

Monitoring systems are expected to play a major role in active distribution grids, and the design of the measurement infrastructure is a critical element for an effective operation. The use of any available and newly installed, though heterogeneous, metering device providing more accurate and real-time measurement data offers a new paradigm for the distribution grid monitoring system. In this paper the authors study the meter placement problem for the measurement infrastructure of an active distribution network, where heterogeneous measurements provided by Phasor Measurement Units (PMUs) and other advanced measurement systems such as Smart Metering systems are used in addition to measurements that are typical of distribution networks, in particular substation measurements and a-priori knowledge. This work aims at defining a design approach for finding the optimal measurement infrastructure for an active distribution grid. The design problem is posed in terms of a stochastic optimization with the goal of bounding the overall uncertainty of the state estimation using heterogeneous measurements while minimizing the investment cost. The proposed method is also designed for computational efficiency so to cover a wide set of scenarios.

This paper proposes a fault detection and classification method for medium voltage DC (MVDC) shipboard power systems (SPSs) by integrating wavelet transform (WT) multiresolution analysis (MRA) technique with artificial neural networks (ANNs). The MVDC system under consideration for future all-electric ships presents a range of new challenges, in particular the fault detection and classification issues addressed in this paper. The WT-MRA and Parseval's theorem are employed in this paper to extract the features of different faults. The energy variation of the fault signals at different resolution levels are chosen as the feature vectors. As a result of analysis and comparisons, the Daubechies 10 (db10) wavelet and scale 9 are the chosen wavelet function and decomposition level. Then, ANN is adopted to automatically classify the fault types according to the extracted features. Different fault types, such as short circuit faults on both dc bus and ac side, as well as ground fault, are analyzed and tested to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method. These faults are simulated in real time with a digital simulator and the data are then initially analyzed with MATLAB. The case study is a notional MVDC SPS model, and promising classification accuracy can be obtained according to simulation results. Finally, the proposed fault detection algorithm is implemented and tested on a real-time platform, which enables it for future practical use.

Hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) testing is increasingly recognized as an effective approach in the design of power electronics controls. A high-performance real-time simulation environment is necessary to obtain high-fidelity results in HIL simulations. This paper presents the detailed implementation of a very-low-cost multisolver hard real-time simulation environment, namely the real-time extension of the virtual test bed (VTB-RT). VTB-RT is implemented completely from open-source software and off-the-shelf hardware. Using VTB-RT, this paper proposes an efficient real-time HIL testing approach for control designs in power electronics applications. VTB-RT enables the natural coupling between the simulation environment and the hardware under test and, thus, makes virtual power exchange in HIL simulation possible. For validation purposes, the proposed real-time HIL testing approach is applied in two well-known power electronics application examples, namely a boost converter and an H-bridge inverter with their respective control systems, representing a very-low-cost and a relatively advanced hardware setup, respectively. The consistency of the experimental results with the theoretical results proves the applicability of VTB-RT and the proposed testing approach. Finally, the most recent research progresses in VTB-RT are summarized

Bus voltage stability is a key issue in future medium-voltage DC (MVDC) power systems on ships. The presence of high-bandwidth controlled load converters (Constant Power Load, CPL) may induce voltage instabilities. A control design procedure is presented which starts at the modeling level and comes to control implementation. A control method based on a Linearization via State Feedback (LSF), is proposed to face the CPL destabilizing effect and to ensure the MVDC bus voltage stability. A multiconverter shipboard DC grid is analyzed by means of a new comprehensive model, which is able to capture the overall behavior in a second-order nonlinear differential equation. Exploiting DC–DC converters that interface power sources to the bus, LSF technique is able to compensate for system nonlinearities, obtaining a linear system. Then, traditional linear control techniques can be applied to obtain a desired pole placement. With reference to system parameters mismatch, LSF control design is verified by means of a sensitivity analysis, evaluating the possibility of an over-linearization strategy. Time-domain numerical simulations are used to validate the proposed control, in presence of relevant perturbations by means of a two-way comparison (average value model and detailed switching model).

Under frequency load shedding (UFLS) and under voltage load shedding (UVLS) are attracting more attention, as large disturbances occur more frequently than in the past. Usually, these two schemes work independently from each other, and are not designed in an integrated way to exploit their combined effect on load shedding. Besides, reactive power is seldom considered in the load shedding process. To fill this gap, we propose in this paper a new centralized, adaptive load shedding algorithm, which uses both voltage and frequency information provided by phasor measurement units (PMUs). The main contribution of the new method is the consideration of reactive power together with active power in the load shedding strategy. Therefore, this method addresses the combined voltage and frequency stability issues better than the independent approaches. The new method is tested on the IEEE 39-Bus system, in order to compare it with other methods. Simulation results show that, after large disturbance, this method can bring the system back to a new stable steady state that is better from the point of view of frequency and voltage stability, and loadability.