Toward a Cyber-Physical Digital Twin for Operator Training: Real-Time Co-Simulation of the French Grid

Modern power systems face an increasing need for operator preparedness against complex cyber-physical contingencies that may compromise grid stability. This paper presents a novel real-time co-simulation platform designed to serve as a digital twin of cyber-physical power systems. The platform has been used to simulate the entire French transmission grid in real-time with node-breaker topology while accounting for cyber contingencies in its SCADA infrastructure. The key to the platform’s scalability is the use of an information flow modeling framework instead of cyber simulation detailed at the protocol level. In this framework, users model delays, drops, and data corruptions using stochastic processes. This abstraction covers not only communication impairments, such as delays or packet loss, but also computational slowdowns, database query latencies, and other cyber processes relevant to power system operation.