Actor's based diakoptics for the simulation, monitoring and control of smart grids

Simulation of power systems is an important tool for designing, developing and assessment of new grid architectures and controls within the smart grid concept for the last decades. This tool has evolved for answering the questions proposed by academic researchers and engineers in industry applications; providing different alternatives for covering several realistic scenarios. Nowadays, due to the recent advances in computing hardware, Digital Real-Time Simulation (DRTS) is used to design power systems, to support decisions made in automated Energy Management Systems (EMS) and to reduce the Time to Market of products, among other applications. Power system simulations can be classified in the following categories: (1) Analog simulation (2) off line simulation (3) Fully digital simulation (4) Fast simulation (5) Controller Hardware-In-the-Loop (CHIL) simulation and (6) Power Hardware-In-the-Loop (PHIL) simulation. The latest 3 are focused on Real-Time Hardware-In-the-Loop (RT-HIL) simulation. These categories cover issues related to Electromagnetic Transients (EMT), phasor simulation or mixed (phasor and EMT). As mentioned above, these advances are possible due to the evolution of computing architectures (hardware and software); however, for the particular case of power flow analysis of Distribution Systems (DS) there are still challenges to be solved. The current computing architectures are composed by several cores, leaving behind the paradigm of the sequential programing and leading the digital system developers to consider concepts such as parallelism, concurrency and asynchronous events. On the other hand, the methods for solving the dynamic power flow of distribution systems consider the system as a single block; thus they only use a single core for power flow analysis, regardless of the existence of multiple cores available for improving the simulation performance. Divided into phase and sequence frame methods, these methods have in common features such as considering a single sparse matrix for describing the DS and that they can solve a single frequency simultaneously. These features make of the mentioned methods non-suitable for multithread processing. As a consequence, current computer architectures are sub-used, affecting simulator's performance when handling large scale DS, changing DS topology and including advanced models, among others real life activities. To address these challenges this thesis proposes an approach called A-Diakoptics, which combines the power of Diakoptics and the Actor model; the aim is to make any conventional power flow analysis method suitable for multithread processing. As a result, the nature and complexity of the power system can be modeled without affecting the computing time, even if several parts of the power system operate at different base frequency as in the case of DC micro-grids. Therefore, the dynamic load flow analysis of DS can be performed for covering different simulation needs such as off-line simulation, fast simulation, CHIL and PHIL. This method is an advanced strategy for simulating large-scale distribution systems in unbalanced conditions; covering the basic needs for the implementation of smart grid applications. (author)