EPOCHS : INTEGRATED COTS SOFTWARE FOR AGENT-BASED ELECTRIC POWER AND COMMUNICATION SIMULATION

This paper reports on the development of EPOCHS, the Electric Power and Communication Synchronizing Simulator, a distributed simulation environment. Existing electric power simulation tools do a good job of modeling power systems of the past, which were controlled as large regional power pools without significant communication elements. As power systems increasingly turn to protection and control systems that make use of computer networks, existing power simulators are less and less capable of predicting the likely behavior of large power grids. Similarly, the tools used to evaluate new communication protocols and systems have been developed without any attention to the roles they might play in power scenarios. EPOCHS utilizes multiple research and commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) systems to bridge the gap. EPOCHS is also notable for allowing users to transparently encapsulate complex system behavior that bridges multiple domains through the use of a simple agent-based framework.