TDPSS: A Scalable Time Domain Power System Simulator for Dynamic Security Assessment

Simulation plays a very crucial role to model, study and experiment with any design innovation proposed in the power systems. Since mathematical modeling of power systems leads to tens of thousands of stiff DAEs (differential and algebraic equations), the design of power system simulators involve exercising a trade-off between the simulation speed and modeling accuracy. Lack of efficient and detailed simulators forces the designers to experiment their techniques with small test systems and hence, the results obtained from such experiments may not be representative of the results obtained using real-life power systems. In this paper, we present TDPSS, a high speed time domain power system simulator for dynamic security assessment. TDPSS has been designed using object-oriented programming framework, and thus, it is modular and extensible. By offering a variety of models of power system components and fast numerical algorithms, it provides the user with the flexibility to experiment with different design options in an efficient manner. We discuss the design of TDPSS to give insights into the simulation infrastructure and also discuss the areas where TDPSS can be extended for parallel contingency analysis. We also validate it against the commercial power system simulators, namely PSSE and DSA Tools. Further, we compare the simulation speed of TPDSS for different numerical algorithms. The results have shown that TDPSS is accurate and also outperforms the commonly used commercial simulator PSSE in terms of its computational efficiency.