A simulation platform of active distribution network based on co-simulation of GridLAB-D and Matlab

With increasing integrations of distributed generations, technologies of active distribution network (ADN) have been widely discussed. However, there is still lack of tools which are suitable for simulating control actions of ADN until now. For example, different types of software usually have different requirements for control algorithms implementations, which highly increase development and testing costs of ADN controllers. Based on this background, this paper aims at constructing a simulation platform for ADN control schemes based on co-simulation of GridLAB-D and Matlab. GridLAB-D, developed by the U.S. Department of Energy, is a simulation software for distribution networks. It supports power flow-based sequence simulations with no limitation for simulation duration. Matlab, which has been widely considered as a standard tool for numerical algorithms implementations, can be a great help to reduce the algorithm development cost. In this way, with co-simulation of GridLAB-D and Matlab, the simulation requirements of control schemes can be satisfied by the platform introduced by this paper, which has been verified by several typical ADN cases considering various control schemes. As a standard simulation and test platform, it can be a great help for further researches in ADN field.