Introduction

Abstract

Simulation is a key activity in every engineering domain. It is basically impossible today to imagine a design activity that does not include a simulation verification.The role of simulation has been actually growing more and more in practice. While the main role of simulation in the past has been to replicate reality, it has been more and more moving to anticipate reality. While in the past, it was mostly used to better understand the existing systems, it is now driving the design process so that we may say that the target is now on reality to replicate simulation. Today every complex modern system is first built-in simulation and then realized in reality. Simulation becomes then a formal method of specification that can better summarize the requirements, thanks to the fact that it is strictly a mathematical process.Nevertheless, simulation is also still used to better understand the systems that we already built and operate. A simulation model can be for example used to define and analyze "what if" scenarios for an infrastructure.Simulation in the power system has always been a very important activity, mostly because an experimental activity, strictly speaking, is basically impossible. While testing can be performed on a real grid, it is anyway impossible to perform comprehensive testing or testing that can impact wide areas such as a full transmission system. Also, simulation has been always offering a safer way to understand critical situations such as faults.Real-time simulation has in the recent years added a new dimension to the power system research offering close to reality experiments in a different scale from small-field tests. The further development in the direction of hardware in the loop and power hardware in the loop has extended the concept of testing and validation in the power engineering domain.All these considerations should make clear how the simulation science is a key asset for a modern power engineer. On the other hand, when we deal with simulators, we typically deal with a sort of black box. As good engineering practice it is then critical to have an understanding of what is inside the box.In the trend to simulation-driven engineering, it is in fact very important to deeply understand how simulators work to be sure that we always take educated decisions in the process. Building trust in the simulation results is a key activity for every engineer. A modern engineer is not likely to develop a new simulation platform but it is definitely likely to use one or more of them for the everyday job.The purpose of this book is to look "under the hood" of modern simulators to help engineers developing their understanding of when and why the simulations results from a given tool can be trusted.In effect, there is not a single simulator able to tackle all the questions that a power engineer may face, but there are several tools that are better suited for a given question.Different commercial platforms use different modeling approaches and each approach may face limitations in a given condition. In this respect, this book will not define the perfect solution for every question, but it will provide an unbiased guide to different simulation approaches presenting pros and cons of the different solutions.

Authors 2

1. Antonello Monti Aachen Institute for Automation of Complex Power Systems

   RWTH Aachen University · Forschungszentrum Jülich · Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Information Technology

   Affiliation as printed

   Department of Mechanical Engineering

   Fraunhofer FIT Center for Digital Energy

   Institute for Automation of Complex Power Systems

   Institute of Energy and Climate Research: Energy Systems Engineering (IEK-10)

   Juelich Research Center

   RWTH Aachen University

   Institute for Automation of Complex Power Systems, RWTH Aachen University, , Germany

2. Andrea Benigni Aachen

   RWTH Aachen University · Forschungszentrum Jülich · Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Information Technology

   Affiliation as printed

   Department of Mechanical Engineering

   Fraunhofer FIT Center for Digital Energy

   Institute for Automation of Complex Power Systems

   Institute of Energy and Climate Research: Energy Systems Engineering (IEK-10)

   Juelich Research Center

   RWTH Aachen University

   Institute of Energy and Climate Research: Energy Systems Engineering (IEK-10), Juelich Research Center, , Germany