Development of a Platform for Distributed Energy Resources Management on the Basis of a Digital Twin

Abstract

The paper discusses the development of a platform for distributed energy resources management based on digital twins. The platform use cases include demand response, electric vehicle charging, peer-to-peer energy trading, storage scheduling, virtual power plant, and so on. Thanks to the digital twin, the platform can perform the use cases controlling either real operation-stage equipment or virtual design-stage simulation models. The platform offers mass distributed energy resources owners and operators to improve the power supply quality (including stability), reduce costs (including transaction overhead), and gain emerging market opportunities (including participation in various aggregators' programs). Software and equipment vendors are interested in the platform's capability to quickly assemble distributed energy management systems almost without programming. The digital twin and the platform are designed with the viewpoint-based approach established by the international systems engineering standard ISO/IEC/IEEE 42010. The typical power system digital twin architecture is described. The major kinds of mathematical models as part of digital twins are presented: physical models based on numerical solutions of differential equations and optimization problems, machine learning models, knowledge-based models. The interoperability of such heterogeneous models is ensured on the basis of the ontological model of distributed energy. The platform architecture is represented from three key viewpoints: functional, information, and software. To formalize and ultimately automate the integration of heterogeneous models, we propose novel mathematical methods of model-based system engineering based on category theory, including universal constructions and the multicomma. The multicomma category is shown to be constructed using standard product, exponent, and pushout constructions, which makes it possible to establish a number of its practically significant properties.