Real-time applications for electric power generation and voltage control

This chapter deals with real-time applications of digital devices aimed at voltage control of transmission and distribution systems. The focus is on the implementation of the aforementioned devices as digital control systems using microprocessors and general-purpose computing systems, fitted out with operating systems for general use but with real-time characteristics. With this aim, high level simulation tools designed to model the plant process, and automatically generate a control code appear to be a promising approach to quickly prototype control systems. This chapter discusses in details the application and simulation results of such real-time operating systems (RTOSs) and hardware (HW)-software (SW) platforms for voltage control applications in some real-world distribution networks with inclusion of distributed generation.