Automation of commercial power system software for data-driven research

The advent of large-scale power system software packages has made a crucial impact on tasks performed both in industry and research domains. However, additional analysis on the results in an external program is commonly necessitated for a variety of applications. This requires importing and managing the resulting data into an external platform, increasing user effort and rendering the process cumbersome. One of the capabilities of commercial software is an automation server which allows the software to be directly interfaced with an external processing program. This enables automatic retrieval of data without the need to maintain a database manually. This automation would allow for more straightforward algorithms and freedom in design, motivating more innovative data-driven methods with the use of multiple programs in a single environment. In this paper, we will discuss the generic capabilities of such automation servers, their setup, and explore the development of a simulation-based fault location algorithm applying this technique and the subsequent results.