An Open Source Power System Simulator in Python for Efficient Prototyping of WAMPAC Applications

Abstract

An open source software package for performing dynamic RMS simulation of small to medium-sized power systems is presented, written entirely in the Python programming language. The main objective is to facilitate fast prototyping of new wide area monitoring, control and protection applications for the future power system by enabling seamless integration with other tools available for Python in the open source community, e.g. for signal processing, artificial intelligence, communication protocols etc. The focus is thus transparency and expandability rather than computational efficiency and performance.The main purpose of this paper, besides presenting the code and some results, is to share interesting experiences with the power system community, and thus stimulate wider use and further development. Two interesting conclusions at the current stage of development are as follows:First, the simulation code is fast enough to emulate real-time simulation for small and medium-size grids with a time step of 5 ms, and allows for interactive feedback from the user during the simulation. Second, the simulation code can be uploaded to an online Python interpreter, edited, run and shared with anyone with a compatible internet browser. Based on this, we believe that the presented simulation code could be a valuable tool, both for researchers in early stages of prototyping real-time applications, and in the educational setting, for students developing intuition for concepts and phenomena through real-time interaction with a running power system model.

Investigations on Secondary Voltage Control for Long-Term Reactive Power Management

“…The objective of this paper is to demonstrate the benefits of the hierarchical SVR approach through dynamic simulations run in DynPSSimPy, an open-source power system simulator in Python [15]. The primary contribution refers to the case studies and related discussions on bus voltage behavior, reactive power management and active power losses.…”

“…4 profiles using an iterative step of variable size around one second. A comprehensive description of the simulator functionalities can be found in [15].…”

Comparison of Voltage Stability Indices Based on Synchronized PMU Measurements

“…III. METHODOLOGY Performance assessment and comparisons of the three VSIs were based on data from dynamic simulations carried out in the open-source Python-based power system simulator DynPSSimPy [17]. All simulations had a sampling rate of 50 Hz, i.e., voltage and current phasors required for the VSI algorithms were acquired every 20 ms just as is done via PMUs.…”