This paper presents a novel Multicore Architecture for Real-Time Hybrid Applications (MARTHA) with time-predictable execution, low computational latency, and high performance that meets the requirements for control, emulation and estimation of next-generation power electronics and smart grid systems. Generic general-purpose architectures running real-time operating systems (RTOS) or quality of service (QoS) schedulers have not been able to meet the hard real-time constraints required by these applications. We present a framework based on switched hybrid automata for modeling power electronics applications. Our approach allows a large class of power electronics circuits to be expressed as switched hybrid models which can be executed on a single hardware platform.

The smart grid concept is a good example of a complex cyber-physical system (CPS) that exhibits intricate interplay between control, sensing, and communication infrastructure on one side, and power processing and actuation on the other side. The more extensive use of computation, sensing, and communication, tightly coupled with power processing, calls for a fundamental reassessment of some of the prevailing paradigms in the real-time control and communication abstractions. Today these abstractions are mostly thought of as embedded systems, and the overall framework needs to be reformed in order to fully realize the potential of the emerging field of cyber-physical systems. This paper details the design and application of a new ultrahigh speed real-time emulation platform for Hardware-in-the-Loop (HiL) testing and design of high-power power electronics systems. Our real-time hardware emulation for HiL systems is based on a reconfigurable, heterogeneous, multicore processor architecture that emulates power electronics, and includes a circuit compiler that translates graphic system models into processor executable machine code. We present the hardware architecture, and describe the process of power electronic circuit compilation. This approach yields real-time execution on the order of 1μs simulation time step (including input/output latency) for a broad class of power electronics converters. To the best of our knowledge, no current academic or industrial HiL system has such a fast emulation response time. We present HiL experimental results for three representative systems: a variable speed induction motor drive, a utility grid connected photovoltaic converter system, and a hybrid electric vehicle motor drive.