Microgrid Planner: An Open-Source Software Platform

Abstract

We introduce an open-source software platform for developing microgrid planning tools. Our platform is composed of a computational layer developed in Python; a MySQL database layer; a REST API developed in Flask; a web app front end developed in Flask, HTML templates, and JavaScript; containerized deployment through Docker; and high-performance computing integration using Slurm. Our base capabilities include user accounts with authentication, user-defined distributed energy resource components and microgrids, user uploads of power load data, a core simulation method, and a microgrid sizing method. These capabilities are all integrated into a user-friendly web application, which is designed to be customized and extended. Whereas our platform already includes a useful set of microgrid planning tools, our vision is for it to bridge the active academic analytical modeling research for microgrid planning into deployable software tools that can be readily used by practitioners. In addition to describing our current capabilities, this paper details how our platform design facilitates easy adoption by other researchers developing analytical methods for microgrid planning. History: Accepted by Ted Ralphs, Area Editor for Software Tools. Funding: This research was supported by the NextSTEP Program, sponsored by the Office of Naval Research; by Naval Facilities Engineering Systems Command as part of the Navy Shore Energy Technology Transition and Integration program; and by the Director of Operational Energy, Deputy Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Navy. Supplemental Material: The software that supports the findings of this study is available within the paper and its Supplemental Information ( https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/suppl/10.1287/ijoc.2023.0336 ) as well as from the IJOC GitHub software repository ( https://github.com/INFORMSJoC/2023.0336 ). The complete IJOC Software and Data Repository is available at https://informsjoc.github.io/ .