As the landscape of devices that interact with the electrical grid expands,
also the complexity of the scenarios that arise from these interactions
increases. Validation methods and tools are typically domain specific and are
designed to approach mainly component level testing. For this kind of
applications, software and hardware-in-the-loop based simulations as well as
lab experiments are all tools that allow testing with different degrees of
accuracy at various stages in the development life-cycle. However, things are
vastly different when analysing the tools and the methodology available for
performing system-level validation. Until now there are no available
well-defined approaches for testing complex use cases involving components from
different domains. Smart grid applications would typically include a relatively
large number of physical devices, software components, as well as communication
technology, all working hand in hand. This paper explores the possibilities
that are opened in terms of testing by the integration of a real-time simulator
into co-simulation environments. Three practical implementations of such
systems together with performance metrics are discussed. Two control-related
examples are selected in order to show the capabilities of the proposed
approach.Comment: IECON 2019 - 45th Annual Conference of the IEEE Industrial
Electronics Societ