Design a co-simulation platform for power system and communication network

With the rapidly development of smart grid, communication network will play more and more fundamental role in many smart grid applications and services. The interaction between power system and communication network will appear almost everywhere in the new services of smart grid, the investigation of mixture system combined power system and communication network reveals the mutual influence of each other, and will give accuracy and quantitative data for the planning of the future smart grid. This paper presents a novel co-simulation platform combined power system and communication network to meet the decision-making need in smart grid environment. The platform connects power system simulator and communication system simulator together via a middleware with interfaces, a synchronization method is proposed for the correct time and sequence of data exchange, a time step adjustment algorithm is proposed as well to balance the requirement of accuracy and efficiency.