Real-time simulation, as the name suggests, allows analysis of a physical systems in real time. In real-time simulation the physical time and the simulation time are the same. This helps greatly in conducting hardware in the loop simulation and evaluation of control hardware and software. The features of simulator are:

• Real-time simulation of large power system and power electronics equipments with constant accuracy level.
• User-friendly man-machine interfaces, which mimic the actual operating environment including interactive setting of several system parameters and real-time data presentation on a CRT.
• High-speed A/D (analog to digital) converters.
• D/A (digital to analog) converters.
• D/IO (digital input and digital output) interfaces are used to connect the digital simulator (power system dynamic model) to actual equipment.

The real-time simulator consists of hardware and software. The hardware will consist of a rack-based structure with multiple digital signal processor (DSP) cards. This will be connected to a host computer running the GNU/Linux operating system through a high-speed link. The hardware will also interact with the external world through an I/O subsystem consisting of digital and analog parts.

A floating-point DSP based hardware and the associated low-level software has been developed. The floating point DSP hardware is essentially used for control system implementation for power electronic converters and used to simulate machine models in real time.

The proposed simulator is being developed by combining the knowledge and expertise of academic institutes, CPRI and C-DAC Trivandrum.