New-Tech Europe Magazine | May 2018

will be successful, or, at least, that no software-related hazardous control issues will occur during tests with non- emulated, real power. Get certification faster, in a more streamlined and economical way Benefits of HIL extend beyond product development, as HIL caters to the entire product life-cycle by enabling rapid product upgrades and streamlined regression testing of control software. More specifically, when the only updates that must be made to the product are software-related, new versions of control can be tested exclusively in the real-time HIL domain, without costly, lengthy and potentially risky procedures involved in physical testing. For example, with HIL it takes about 90 seconds to power up the inverter controller with an emulated load, reach the steady state, insert a disturbance, measure the response of the inverter with the emulated power and turn the controller off. The test sequence for assessing the response takes the same amount of time as with the real setup, because the controllers are real, and the test is run in real time. Time and cost savings come from the fact that there is virtually no setup time, no MWs of real power consumed during testing, no (potential) damage to DUT, and from the fact that testing can be conducted in a fully automated fashion with absolutely no need for operator involvement. This is particularly useful when introducing a product, e.g. a solar inverter, into a new market requires slight modifications to the software because of local laws, regulations, or country-specific certification standards. Lower R&D costs for complex systems by using HIL Yet another benefit of HIL testing is automated testing of complex systems in an unattended manner. More explicitly, with language agnostic APIs, such as RCP API based on JSON-RCP 2.0, and with support for standardized protocols, such as IEC 61850, Modbus, DNP3 and OPC UA, controllers can be

Figure 2: Lowering OPEX by using HIL for control system testing (example)

tested in a fully automatic mode with no human supervision while interacting with diverse physical equipment, such as relays, and third-party software suites, such as SCADA systems or plant management systems. In this manner, the controller software can be tested in actual, working systems with real, working system components, but without any dangers to the operation of the actual system. This significantly lowers R&D costs as the engineers can focus on solving actual engineering problems, while the automated HIL system generates detailed reports on the performance of their solutions during overnight testing, i.e. outside engineers’ working hours. Simplify system integration

When paired with scalability, full automation and communication capabilities are also immensely valuable to system integrators, where HIL brings the benefit of making the process of integrating diverse components quicker, smoother and more efficient. Namely, system integrators, if they have a scalable HIL solution at their disposal, can take diverse controllers of diverse devices and interface them to the same real-time model of a power stage (e.g. a microgrid, or a shipboard power system). Then, by focusing exclusively on the controllers, integrators can fully optimize the interoperability of diverse components and be sure that the system is going to work flawlessly once commissioned – and do it before

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