Modeling and Simulation of the Power Flow in Smart Systems

This chapter describes a methodology for modeling and simulation of Electrical Energy Systems, based on a “native” power modeling and simulation approach, where power is explicitly simulated as a (non digital) signal. The proposed methodology relies on the use of a standard hardware description language (HDL), namely SystemC, and exploits its extension to model and simulate analog and mixed-signal (AMS) components, thus enabling the concurrent simulation of functionality and the tracking of power. The approach relies on the definition of a unified interface for the various components of a smart system from the power perspective (ESDs, power sources, power converters, interconnects, and functional components—regarded as “loads”) and a “metamodeling” approach in which models of actual devices are fitted to the model templates defined by those interfaces. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is demonstrated on an industry-strength smart system prototype, where significant performance speedups against model-based tools were achieved.