A New Concept of a Generic Co-Simulation Platform for Energy Systems Modeling

In order to model, design, execute, control and analyze co-simulations for e.g. Smart Grids, a new scalable and generic system architecture of an agent-based co-simulation platform framework is presented in this article. Not only different kinds of simulators e.g. for power grids and technical plants, but also various types of data sources and real hardware nodes, such as wind turbines, photovoltaic cells, electrical power grid equipment, etc. which are instrumented by measurement devices, can be seamlessly integrated into the co-simulation platform in order to model large transdisciplinary, multi-domain energy systems. By integrating Apache Kafka as message exchange infrastructure into this configurable co-simulation platform the realistic simulation of SCADA communication via standard communication network protocols and services for Smart Grid including big data scenarios can be realized. As basic approaches container virtualization and microservices, namely, Docker con-tainers and a Representational State Transfer (REST) application programming interface (API), are used as an automated runtime environment to control and manage different simulation nodes on a (larger) computing cluster. The co-simulation platform also provides an easy-to-use web browser-based user interface implemented using Angular2 to allow users to model, implement, perform and operate co-simulations for future energy system solutions without any setup or configuration on their local PC and extensive IT knowledge. Furthermore, after the completion of simulations by the individual nodes, the results of a co-simulation run can be automatically stored in databases and then analyzed and visualized afterwards via a web user interface.

@article{Liu2018,
  title     = {A New Concept of a Generic Co-Simulation Platform for Energy Systems Modeling},
  journal   = {International Journal of Advanced Computer Science and Applications},
  volume    = {9},
  number    = {1},
  year      = {2018},
  publisher = {The Science and Information Organization},
  author    = {Jianlei Liu and Clemens Duepmeier and Veit Hagenmeyer},
  doi       = {10.14569/SpecialIssue.2018.090111},
  url       = {https://doi.org/10.14569/SpecialIssue.2018.090111}
}