SImulation of High-Voltage Substations on Parallel ARchitectures

New generation of real-time and safety critical embedded control systems is characterized by new functionality, such as self diagnosis and system reconfiguration, that need powerful hardware architectures in order to meet performance requirements. The availability of parallel architectures based on inexpensive microprocessors suggests the adoption'of parallel computer systems even in such a critical field. In spite of that, the introduction of High Performance Computing (HPC) solutions in an industrial environment requires a careful analysis of their impact based on realistic experiments. One of such experiments is the objective of SISPAR (Simulation of high-voltage Substations on Parallel Architectures) projectL This project is aimed at evaluating the effectiveness of closely coupled parallel architectures to improve an existing application provided by ENEL, the Italian electricity utility. In particular, the project intends to parallelize a real time simulator of High Voltage (HV) electrical substations. HV-substations are nodes of the high voltage (380-220 kV) transport meshed network that links distribution network to power generation plants, located in various sites of the Italian territory. Substations mainly consist of electrical components such as breakers, insulators, etc., aggregated into Functional Units (FU). Each substation includes a specific number of FUs and is characterized by specific parameters. This plant configurability is usually exploited by developing configurable software for automation systems and plant simulators. The parallel architecture selected in SISPAR -i.e. a hypercube of transputer based nodesallows the extension of this configurability to the simulator target hardware, leading to a class of systems entirely scaleable: the number of both software simulator components and hypercube nodes is defined according to the number of FUs belonging to the specific HV-substation. Real-time simulators have to support the validation of functionality and performance of HV-substation automation systems before their installation on real substations, reproducing the same cyclic behavior, timing and I/O of such plants. The current generation of HV-substation simulators is based on conventional architectures composed of single processors, that cannot fully support the whole performance requirements. Therefore, these simulators are used to validate plant automation functions in multi-steps approach: different subsets of the substation components are simulated at each simulation session in order to meet real-time requirements.