PowSyBl (Power System Blocks) is an open source library dedicated to electrical grid modeling and simulation. PowSyBl is written in Java and licensed under the Mozilla Public License 2.0.

PowSyBl may be scripted for a quick solution, but it can also be used as a library to write complex software for power system simulation and analysis. Using PowSyBl, developers can create applications able to perform dynamic power flow simulations and security analyses on the network, handle a variety of formats including CGMES for European data exchanges, and many other tasks.

PowSyBl has a completely modular design, enabling developers to extend or customize its features by providing their own plugins. Modularity is a key value of PowSyBl’s open source design.

The image below shows the PowSyBl network map service, showing the electrical grid as a network over a map of Paris:

PowSyBl provides a complete internal model of the electrical grid, complete with substations, voltage levels, AC and DC lines, two- and three- winding transformers, batteries, generators, loads, shunt and static VAR compensators, and other related equipment.

For security analyses, PowSyBl enables users to define contingencies on the network. The grid model can also be enhanced with extensions that provide complete equipment modeling, including dynamic profile, short-circuit profile, and monitoring.

PowSyBl also provides importers and exporters for several common pan-European exchange formats – ENTSO-E CIM/CGMES, UCTE-DEF, and more.

PowSyBl as a library provides several APIs for power system simulation and analysis, including power flow computation, security analysis, remedial action simulation, sensitivity analysis, time domain simulation, and other simulations. These simulations can run either on a personal computer or on a server. The separation of the simulation API from the implementations allows developers to provide their own implementations if necessary, making the framework very flexible.

PowSyBl is also available as a command line tool for quick-shot modelling and simulation. PowSyBl scripts may be written and executed thanks to the dedicated Domain Specific Language (DSL) code included in the project.

All features of PowSyBl are exposed as web services to make it easy to build web-based applications on top of the framework.

Project Features

PowSyBl includes many features:

• Grid data model, described with Java classes
• Extension capability with plugins
• Data management system
• Importers and exporters for several formats (CIM-CGMES, UCTE, and others)
• APIs to various computation modules (load-flow, security analysis, short-circuit computation, sensitivity computation, optimizers, AMPL)
• Distribution framework for HPC (tested on a 10,000-core platform)
• Scripting
• Advanced functions: grid model merging, remedial actions manager
• Modular architecture based on plugins

PowSyBl as a library provides several APIs for power system simulations and analyses, including:

• Power flow computations
• Security analyses
• Remedial action simulations
• Short circuits computations
• Sensitivity computations
• Time domain simulations

These simulations can run on a supercomputer – this has been tested using the CORDIS iTesla project with the Curie supercomputer.

PowSyBl was initiated by RTE and contributed to LF Energy in 2019.