InterPSS: A New Generation Power System Simulation Engine

📝 Abstract

This paper presents the design of InterPSS simulation engine, including its object model, open software architecture, and software development process. Several advanced applications, including an integrated transmission and distribution co-simulation, an electromagnetic transient and phasor domain hybrid simulation, and InterPSS integration with a market simulator, have been developed by either extending InterPSS simulation engine or integrating it with other programs and/or platforms. These advanced applications show that the open architecture combined with the comprehensive modeling and simulation capabilities make InterPSS a very attractive option for the research and the future new power system simulation application development.

💡 Analysis

This paper presents the design of InterPSS simulation engine, including its object model, open software architecture, and software development process. Several advanced applications, including an integrated transmission and distribution co-simulation, an electromagnetic transient and phasor domain hybrid simulation, and InterPSS integration with a market simulator, have been developed by either extending InterPSS simulation engine or integrating it with other programs and/or platforms. These advanced applications show that the open architecture combined with the comprehensive modeling and simulation capabilities make InterPSS a very attractive option for the research and the future new power system simulation application development.

📄 Content

InterPSS: A New Generation
Power System Simulation Engine Mike Zhou, Member, IEEE State Grid EPRI Beijing China mike.zhou@interpss.org

Qiuhua Huang, Member, IEEE Pacific Northwest National Laboratory Richland, WA, USA qiuhua.huang@pnnl.gov Abstract—This paper presents the design of InterPSS simulation engine, including its object model, open software architecture, and software development process. Several advanced applications, including an integrated transmission and distribution co-simulation, an electromagnetic transient and phasor domain hybrid simulation, and InterPSS integration with a market simulator, have been developed by either extending InterPSS simulation engine or integrating it with other programs and/or platforms. These advanced applications show that the open architecture combined with the comprehensive modeling and simulation capabilities make InterPSS a very attractive option for the research and the future new power system simulation application development. Index Terms–Hybrid simulation, Integrated transmission and distribution system co-simulation, Model-Driven Development, Power System Modeling, Power System Simulation. I. INTRODUCTION A. Motivation The landscape of the IT technology has been fundamentally changed over the last 40 years. The computing environment available to the power system simulation has been changed from one workstation with one CPU to the computer cluster with multiple computer nodes, each with multiple CPU/Core. The software system architecture and the associated development process of power system simulation software should be also updated accordingly to catch-up the IT technology advances. Core simulation engines of the main stream commercial power system simulation software, such as PSS/E, BPA, and PSASP (developed by China Electric Power Research Institute), were mostly developed in the last century, mainly using the Fortran programming language and the procedure programming approach. Each application/program is mainly focusing on a specific problem or domain, e.g., AC Loadflow, Short Circuit analysis, transmission system or distribution system analysis. From the software development perspective, it has been known that the inability to reuse code throughout the program and the difficulty in error checking using the procedure programming approach usually result in the software system being very difficult to maintain and extend.
From the power system simulation application perspective, there are three main challenges: 1) the simulation models and algorithms are difficult to extend; 2) the new computing hardware (e.g., multi-core CPU and GPU) and/or platforms (e.g., cloud computing) cannot be (fully) leveraged; 3) the simulation engines are not adequate to meet the analysis and simulation demand for the development of integrated power grid as well as integrated energy system. To address these challenges, a new generation power system simulation engine architecture and design is required. The InterPSS (Internet-technology Based Power System Simulator) project [1],[2] was created, aiming to provide an open simulation engine and the associated software development platform to the power engineering community where researchers and developers can easily extend the simulation engine or the platform to develop domain-specific or cross-domain power system simulation applications. B. Literature Review Since there is limited information available regarding the internal architecture and development approach of the commercial (proprietary) simulation tools, the review is focused on the open-source simulation tools. For Matlab- based packages, there are PST [3], PSAT [4], and MatPower [5]. PYPOWER[6] and DOME[7] are developed based on Python. Open-source distribution system simulation tools include OpenDSS [8], developed in Delphi, and GridLAB-D [9], developed in C++. These tools focus on specific power system domain modeling and analysis functionality implementation. The tools are mainly developed as a “complete solution” package, with little focus on providing a platform or capabilities for extension and integration with other applications. It was noticed that the abstraction capability, modularity, and extensibility of object-oriented programming (OOP) was recognized by the developers of PSAT, MatPower, DOME, and GridLAB-D. Furthermore OOP concepts have been adopted in their development at various levels. However, no systematic and unified OOP approach is found, and the model (object) driven development approach not used in these open-source projects. Except for DOME having an independent core simulation module, other simulation tools are still heavily influenced by This work was partially supported by the State Grid of China under the “Thousand Talents Plan” special research grant (5206001600A3). the tra

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