EXata CPS

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This co-simulation setup is about running both the Cyber (with EXata) and the Physical (with OPAL-RT) Systems within one of our simulators (and thus the CPS acronym when opening EXata).

In any power systems, the presence of telecommunication networks and intelligence devices is becoming more and more universal. Investigating the impacts and the potential strength and weaknesses of this coupling between those two worlds is becoming urgent, for the sake of a strong and reliable network.

We joined forces with Keysight to offer a commercially off-the-shelf and scalable solution.

All you need is one of our simulators with at least 6 physical cores total, the external devices you want to use and a good Windows computer.

Having a quad port in the simulator is also recommended, as it allows to connect more devices that are in different subnets simultaneously.

The logic is as follow:

An OPAL-RT Simulator contains X physical cores. One of them is always reserved for the operating system (OS), and, in the case of the CPS setup, the two last cores will be dedicated to EXata. The remaining X – 3 cores will be for the real-time simulation and the drivers.

Furthermore, to avoid conflicts between the two softwares, EXata is running in a different namespace inside the simulator and the communication protocols streams will go through virtual communication links.

It is possible to migrate one (or several) interface(s) to the ns_exata namespace and communicate with the outside world too.

All previous capabilities from the simulator remain too. For instance, you can still use analog and digital inputs and outputs and you can also have some communication protocols that do not go through EXata if you want too.

The first part is about the installation process for this co-simulation setup (excluding the installation of RT-LAB or HYPERSIM, since it should already be done in the pre-requisite courses).

Then, we are showing the basics of the EXata software, and we are using it as standalone (i.e. without RT-LAB or HYPERSIM, but with the OPAL-RT simulator).

Afterwards, the course covers how to integrate RT-LAB or HYPERSIM and EXata.

Of course, the study of this coupling in steady state is one thing, but another important part is what happens in case of faults, failures and cyber attacks. Therefore, there is a section about implementing faults and cyber-attacks in EXata. The modify packets attack is a typical cyber attack to investigate the impacts of corrupted values, so we will go into more details about this too.

In all the examples, we are using TCP because this protocol does not require any additional license, so anyone who already has RT-LAB or HYPERSIM can try it and TCP is the foundation of all application layer protocols.

In the ‘extra features’, we are showing how to do hardware in the loop using a Raspberry Pi as an external device.

In the ‘advanced demos’, there are two demos of more advanced use cases of RT-LAB and EXata, to inspire you for your next project!