The OpenIPSL was developed to be a familiar alternative to traditional
power system analysis tools. Tutorials on OpenIPSL have been given at many conferences, and are available under the following links. We recommend you start from there:
The time domain simulations using OpenIPSL models require Modelica-compliant tools.
Users of the OpenIPSL are free to choose their tool of choice. However, note that the development of OpenIPSL has been carried out using OpenModelica, Dymola, Modelon Impact and Wolfram SystemModeler.
The library is, also, systematically checked using the two mentioned tools (see Library Testing).
Nonetheless, it might be possible to face issues when using other Modelica Tools that we have not fully tested.
There are many examples included in the library that can be used as a starting point for the users to run time domain simulations. They are located in the Examples package.
When building models from scratch, the user will need to provide initial guess values for certain variables. This is a common requirement for all models in Modelica libraries, and it is not specific to OpenIPSL.
In the case of OpenIPSL, all models require initial guess values that should come from a solution of the steady state of the overall model, i.e., a power flow solution. However, there is no power flow solver associated to the library as of the present time. The users are free to choose their power flow software of choice.
Almost all of our models have been developed to provide the same response than a reference power system simulation tool, e.g., PSAT and PSS®E. You can use these tools to create a power flow solution for your network. If you do not have access to these tools or do not want to use them, there are several power flow solvers available on GitHub. Examples on how to generate Modelica records from open source and proprietary power flow solvers, specifically VeraGrid (formerly GridCal) and PSS®E can be found in this paper and in this GitHub repository.
From these values, a Modelica tool solves the initialization problem for all algebraic and differential - state variables.
All models in OpenIPSL are programmed in such way that by introducing a power flow solution (from another tool), the initial guesses are computed as parameters within each model and are provided into the initial equations that are used as an initial guess to solve the overall initialization problem.
See this paper for a more detailed explanation.
As we have just mentioned, the full initialization of the components' internal variables and states is achieved by a set of internal initial equations that are to be derived by the developer of the model. In a effort to harmonized the presentation of the power flow parameters, a model should extend pfComponent that will provide all the necessary parameters for data coming from power flow solutions to be used in the initialization of the model. The pfComponent also provide the support for the common SystemBase component that provides a single instance of the system's common parameters, i.e., frequency and base power.
A specific tutorial for the user's to adopt the use power flow records is included in the library and can be found in Examples.Tutorial.Example_4, along with the Python utilities to generate the records from PSS®E and VeraGrid, which are distributed with this library under Resources.utils.pf2rec.