Co-simulation of Power System and Synchrophasor Communication Network on a Single Simulation Platform

Analysis of the impact of communication network infrastructure performance on critical power system applications that rely on wide area synchrophasor measurements can be realistically achieved only through co-simulation of the power system and the synchrophasor communication network. In this paper, a single simulation platform, an electromagnetic transient (EMT) simulation program - PSCAD/EMTDC, was used to implement the detailed models of the components in a wide area synchrophasor network. Using the developed components models, a simple wide area damping control application was co-simulated to demonstrate the impact of communication latency, packet losses, and bit flip errors on the controller performance. It was shown that with the aid of co-simulations, application specific issues can be diagnosed and appropriate solutions can be investigated.