Simulation-based Environment for Modeling Distributed Agents for Smart Grid Energy Management

As control systems become more complex, increased levels of testing and validation lead to improvements in control system robustness and reliability. We propose a testing and validation scenario in which control and plant algorithms are executed on real-time targets in a multi-agent distributed simulation environment. This simulation environment is achieved by embedding the simulation into micro controllers thereby allowing real-time interactions between the simulation and controller. In this paper, we discuss a distributed simulation environment that combines control, agents, and simulation in the Matlab xPC target technology for the embeddable simulation part of the environment. We intend to embed the simulation into an ARM-based core micro controller. The simulations and the (Programmable Logic Controller) PLC concurrently interact with each other using a (Common Industrial Protocol) CIP-based tag-level communications protocol. This combination of technologies creates a high fidelity testing environment.