Using component technology in power system simulations

This paper examines the impact of the evolution of software technology on the development and deployment of power system simulations. It takes into consideration the heavy reliance of these software systems on the traditional procedural approach based on the Fortran programming language. However, it is eminent that this approach is gradually being superseded by object-oriented techniques as well as the latest method commonly known as component technology. Although it is possible to rebuild the entire analysis software using the new technology, this paper demonstrates that the development effort can be greatly reduced by reusing the many Fortran-based algorithms. This is achieved by taking advantage of the flexibilities provided by the component technology to rehash the existing algorithms into individual components that can be utilized by existing application software as well as the distributed application software of the future.