Co-simulation platform for smart grid applications

Co-simulation platform capable of accurately capturing the effects of power distribution network events as well as the communication network events is essential to develop realistic modeling and simulation of emerging smart grid scenarios. We present a new approach for co-simulation by addressing the issues of time and object synchronization between two different simulation environments, which are used to analyze the performance of power and communication networks. In this work, we use two popular simulation environments - MATLAB/Simulink and NS-3. We extend the synchronization at pre-determined step method by devising a mediator which maintains an efficient integration between two different simulation environments. This mediator supports to mitigate the widely recognized issues of time accumulation errors, the impact of pack loss and long simulation time. We verify the effectiveness of the proposed co-simulation approach by using a micro-grid use case.