Accelerating the Simulation of Shipboard Power Systems

This paper presents an approach to accelerate the simulation of shipboard power systems. A common issue in the ship research community is the simulation run time of large-scale shipboard power systems. A contributor to lengthy run times is that PC-based power system simulators do not exploit multicore technology, which stems from the fact that software trails advances in hardware. The Center for Electromechanics at the University of Texas at Austin (UT-CEM) is developing a multicore power system solver (CEMS) to simulate shipboard power system models in significantly less time. The simulation run time is reduced by first partitioning power system models and then creating simulations at the subsystem level. This accelerates the simulation of shipboard power systems. A general overview of CEMS and a comparison of its run times against those of SimPowerSystems are presented. The results demonstrate that CEMS can speed up the simulation of shipboard power system models built with SimPowerSystems up to 80 times, and that, despite common belief, multicore desktop computers are capable of executing complex simulation scenarios.