A Distributed Multimodel Cosimulation Platform to Assess General Purpose Services in Smart Grids

Future smart grids with more distributed generation and flexible demand require well-verified control and management services. This article presents a distributed multimodel cosimulation platform based on smart grid architecture model to foster general purpose services in smart grids. It aims at providing developers with support to easily set-up a test-bed environment, where they can simulate realistic scenarios to assess their algorithms and services. The proposed platform takes advantages of internet-of-things communication paradigms and protocols to enable the interoperability among different models and virtual or physical devices that compose a use case. Moreover, the integration of digital real-time simulators unlocks hardware-in-the-loop features. To test the functionality of our platform, a novel scheme of fault detection, isolation, and restoration is developed, in which communication and interoperability of different functions and devices are crucial. This service is applied on a realistic portion of a power grid in Turin, Italy, where devices communicate over the Internet. Finally, the laboratory experimental results achieved during a real-time cosimulation are discussed.