INSPIRE: Integrated co-simulation of power and ICT systems for real-time evaluation

Future power systems in terms of Cyber - Physical Energy Systems (CPES) apply the integration of IT and physical processes using local and wide area communication networks. The smart grid is a typical example of the application of CPES and poses additional challenges to the engineering as these networks consist of two components: the power system itself and an underlying communication network applied for transmitting monitoring and control information. Therefore, performance evaluations of CPES need to take into account both networks in detail in order to provide meaningful results. In this paper, we introduce our simulation environment INtegrated co-Simulation of Power and ICT systems for Real-time Evaluation (INSPIRE), which is based on the Hybrid Simulator Architecture [1] and capable of evaluating both power system and communication network within a co-simulation framework. Besides the simulator architecture, we detail our time synchronization approach, which is applied for interconnecting communication and power system simulation. Secondly, we present reference scenarios and configuration settings for the combined simulation system. Finally, we introduce the first performance evaluation carried out using INSPIRE, covering characteristics of the communication network and highlighting the retroactive effects on the power system using an exemplary control algorithm.