An overview of design specifications and requirements for the MVDC shipboard power system

Abstract The design of Shipboard Power Systems (SPSs) needs careful consideration of a variety of system specifications, operating constraints and design requirements under different operating scenarios and mission profiles to maintain a stable, reliable and economically efficient operation. Especially, for the state-of-the-art DC-based SPSs, with the extensive use of power electronic apparatus and the wide adoption of intelligent ship modernization techniques, the complexity and heterogeneity of on-board electrical systems significantly increase. Therefore, the corresponding specifications, regulations, and requirements that are tailored specifically for DC-based SPSs need to be developed to address the requirements of electric ship design, simulation, control, optimization, management, and automation. Given the limited amount of existing published works in this field, this paper aims to bring together different aspects of model-based electric ship design. It provides a thorough survey of design specification and requirement criteria along with their mathematical formulations that are of different importance, physical natures and time scales to address the transient and steady-state studies for the latest Medium-Voltage DC (MVDC) SPSs. This paper can be considered an attempt to provide a comprehensive study for the SPS research community from academia, industry, and Navy to facilitate various aspects of design, development, and deployment of the MVDC SPS applications.