Coordination Model and Digital Twins for Managing Energy Consumption and Production in a Smart Grid

Abstract

Smart grids play an important role for energy management by directly supporting the socio-ecological transition of neighbourhoods. This research provides the design of a coordination model to enable the management and exchange of electrical energy between producers and consumers at a micro-grid level. This model, which derives from the SAPERE coordination model, allows the intelligent digital twins to interact and generate services on the fly to meet different needs in real time. We have designed producer and consumer digital twins, which autonomously generate supply contracts in the form of a transaction, and supervisor digital twins, which regulate energy at the node level, managing threshold violations and proactively avoiding future threshold violations by using predictions. This coordination model allows energy exchanges in a single node and in a micro-grid structure that contains several neighbouring nodes. We have implemented and tested the platform with realistic data, based on the consumption statistics of a real household, and with real data, collected in the living-lab of “Les Vergers” located near Geneva. The results show that the combination of a coordination model and intelligent digital twins actually supports self-adaptive energy management in a smart grid. Such approaches are fundamental to develop efficient and reliable smart grids.