Early stage design evaluation of shipboard power systems using multi-period power flow

Future shipboard power system architectures are designed to service high-power pulsed loads through a combination of generators and energy storage for volume and weight considerations. Optimal control solutions therefore depend on both past and future events. This complicates evaluation of the relative performance of different architectures due to dependence on controller strategies and algorithms. Herein, we introduce a technique for early stage evaluation of the relative performance of various ship power system designs by assuming a known future and calculating the best-case performance of any possible controller design. We demonstrate this technique using 6 mission scenarios on a representative multi-bus power system architecture. The controller has perfect future knowledge of the loads on each 10 minute mission, which provides an upper bound on performance for a given architecture. While not usually achievable in practice, this technique allows a fair early stage comparison of multiple architectures regardless of controller type.