Educational toolbox for power system analysis

Abstract

Power system simulation involves a wide range of timeframes, starting at microseconds when simulating fast electromagnetic transients and extending to several years in system planning studies. The same system may have to be modeled and solved in many different ways, depending upon the studied event of interest. It has been desirable to have a single software platform from which several power system analysis functions can be easily activated for the same power system. The network under study may go through changes due to switching events, outages of equipment, generators, or loads. Such changes should be recorded only once and recognized by all applications running under this platform. Each application should have easy access to the results produced by any other application. This allows modular development, updating, or replacement of various applications independent of each other. Power Education Toolbox (PET) is such a software package and has been under development at Texas A&M University for several years. The GUI of PET allows users to create one-line diagrams of systems, specify components and simulation parameters, and view output.