Hardware and software aspects of power system simulation, developments at the University of Bath

Power system simulation work at Bath University, UK, has developed from plant parameter identification work associated with the control of synchronous generators. A single machine-infinite bus simulation was produced using timesteps of a few milliseconds. This early work showed that power simulation could be divided into several concurrent processes. At the highest level, user interaction and graphical output can run concurrently with the main calculation model. The model itself has inherent concurrency due to the presence of individual generators within a complex power system. This can be exploited by a computer system using a number of processing units. The authors show that by using multiple microprocessors, a power system simulator can be built with dedicated hardware giving reasonable performance at low cost