Avaliação do limite operacional em ambiente distribuído de um simulador para treinamento de operadores.

Abstract

SimuLIHM is a simulator built with virtual reality features for training purposes. It recreates the operating environment of a substation of an electric system and it was designed to support individual and team training using a distributed network environment, which event-driven architecture aims to reduce the demand on network resources. This work aims to determine the boundary conditions of using this system from the point of view of the load applied to network and the quality of service perceived by its users. The study presented in this paper concerns assessing the network requirements for a typical use case of SimuLIHM, that involves a tutor and two operators, and to determine the maximum number of simultaneous client machines that can connect to its training environment. To accomplish that, we applied several tests supported by tools for the injection of controlled traffic on the network, allowing us to analyze the effect of the increasing network load on the performance of the simulator. It is noteworthy that the experiments’ results failed to prove the relationship between the human error rate and an increased network load, thus requiring further investigation. However, the experiments confirmed this work hypothesis concerning the impact caused by the use of the simulator on the network traffic which proved to be negligible, allowing the parallel connection of dozens of clients to a single instance of the simulator, even on low-speed networks.