Exploring Stability and Accuracy Limits of Distributed Real-Time Power System Simulations via System-of-Systems Cosimulation

Electro-Magnetic Transients (EMT) is the most accurate, but computationally expensive method of analyzing power system phenomena. Thereby, interconnecting several real-time simulators can unlock scalability and system coverage, but leads to a number of new challenges, mainly in time synchronization, numerical stability, and accuracy quantification. This study presents such a co-simulation, based on Digital Real-Time Simulator (DRTS), connected via Aurora 8B/10B protocol. Such a setup allows to analyze complex and hybrid System-of-Systems (SoS) whose resulting numerical phenomena and artifacts have been poorly investigated and understood so far. We experimentally investigate the impact of IEEE 1588 Precision Time Protocol (PTP) synchronization assessing both time and frequency domains. The analysis of the experimental results is encouraging and show that numerical stability can be maintained even with complex system setups. Growing shares of inverter-based renewable power generation require larger and interconnected EMT system studies. This work helps to understand the phenomena connected to such DRTS advanced co-simulation setups.