An IoT realization in an interdepartmental real time simulation lab for distribution system control and management studies

© 2016 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works. Modern electric distribution systems with emerging operation methods and advanced metering systems bring new challenges to the system analysis, control and management. Interdependency of cyber and physical layers and interoperability of various control and management strategies require wide and accurate test and analysis before field implementation. Real-time simulation is known as a precise and reliable method to support new system/device development from initial design to implementation. However, for the study of different application algorithms, considering the various expertise requirements, the interconnection of multiple development laboratories to a real-time simulation lab, which constitutes the core of an interdepartmental real-time simulation platform, is needed. This paper presents the implemented architecture of such an integrated lab, which serves real-time simulations to different application fields within electric distribution system domain. The architecture is an implementation of an Internet-of-Things to facilitate software in-the-loop (SIL) and hardware in-the-loop (HIL) tests. A demo of the proposed architecture is presented, applied to the testing of a fault location algorithm in a portion of a realistic distribution system model. The implemented platform is flexible to integrate different algorithms in a plug-and-play fashion through a designed communication interface.