Remote PHIL Distributed Co-Simulation Lab for TSO-DSO-Customer Coordination Studies

The paper presents the results of an on-going collaboration between two Italian universities, Politecnico di Bari (PoliBa) and Politecnico di Torino (PoliTo), for the setting up of a permanent cooperative co-simulation platform, that permits to share real-time laboratory resources for both research and education applications. The two laboratories, LabZERO and G-RTSLab, are located at a geographical distance of about 1,000 km. By sharing their lab resources, PoliBa and PoliTo aim to increase number and extent of the possible methodologies, control apparatus and power devices that can be jointly tested, and to develop specific applications of Remote Power-Hardware-in-the-Loop (R-PHIL) co-simulation in the framework of Transmission-Distribution-Customer coordination. Test results are presented to assess delays in remote communication and to estimate how much sample rate and size of data packets affect such delays. An experimental test of the R-PHIL platform is also presented to demonstrate the stability of the proposed co-simulation architecture.