ECS-Grid: Data-Oriented Real-Time Simulation Platform for Cyber-Physical Power Systems
Tianshi Cheng, Tong Duan, Venkata Dinavahi
Abstract
ECS-Grid is the first data-oriented real-time electromagnetic transient simulation platform for cyber-physical power systems (CPPS). Traditional simulation tools are constrained by object-oriented programming (OOP) architecture, which is now a significant obstruction to creating a comprehensive cyber-physical simulation. Therefore, the proposed ECS-Grid platform follows a new data-oriented paradigm based on an entity-component-system (ECS) framework, which delivers higher flexibility, extensibility, scalability, and performance to support cyber-physical system research. ECS-Grid proposes a layer of virtual intelligent electronic devices (vIEDs) to model IEDs in CPPSs. The vIEDs directly talk to physical components and communicate asynchronously with cyber services via the proposed high-performance JSON-like binary protocol. Tests with the islanding and the man-in-the-middle cyberattack scenarios on a 711-node ac–dc microgrid cluster based on a modified CIGRE 15-Bus system are performed and give accurate results. A faster-than-real-time performance is achieved on the 10th Gen Intel Core TM i7 computer, and real-time performance is achieved on distributed embedded NVIDIA Jetson platform. The ECS-Grid design and test results demonstrate the potential of the ECS data-oriented paradigm and may inspire the renovation of industrial simulation software.