Latency and Simulation Stability in a Remote Power Hardware-in-the-Loop Co-simulation Testbed

The modern applied research requires multi-disciplinary approaches and can be effectively enriched thanks to the close collaboration of universities' and industries' working teams. This kind of collaboration implies sharing of hardware and software facilities, and profitable contamination of knowledge and expertise among the members of the different teams. In the power system field this kind of approach may result into a remote connection allowing the coupling (and thus the share) of real-time simulators located in different laboratories. This paper describes in detail an experimental testbed (consisting of the interconnection of two real-time simulators, located at Politecnico di Torino and Politecnico di Bari, at a geographical distance of 1,000 km) in order to perform remote Power Hardware-in-the-Loop experiments. The possibilities and limitations of this type of co-simulation are described and a case study is presented. Finally, the specific problems related to communication latency and simulation stability are analysed and discussed.