An Open Framework for Highly Concurrent

Hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) simulation is becoming a significant tool in prototyping complex, highly available systems. The HIL approach allows an engineer to build a physical system incrementally by enabling real components of the system to seamlessly interface with simulated components. It also permits testing of hardware prototypes of components that would be extremely costly to test in the deployed environment. The utility of the HIL approach has until recently been constrained by the limited availability and high cost of software tools for translating the systems of equations (such as Partial Differential Equations) describing the deployed environment into real-time software models. This thesis introduces an open source HIL simulation framework that can be ported to any standard Unix-like system on any shared-memory multiprocessor computer, requires only process pinning from the operating system, provides a soft real-time guarantee for any constituent simulation that does likewise, enables an asynchronous and fluid user interface, and allows for an arbitrary number of secondary control components limited only by the resources of the computer. The practical value of the framework is demonstrated through implementation of a simulated power grid interfacing with a physical power flow controller. The framework is implemented in FACTS Interaction Laboratory (FIL) which provides a real-time HIL simulation of a power transmission network with physical Flexible AC Transmission System (FACTS) devices.