MESCOS- A Multi-Energy Co-Simulator for City District Energy Systems
MESCOS is a simulation platform enabling the analysis of multi-energy systems comprising thermal, electrical and gas supply systems on a city district scale. MESCOS supports the design of control and energy management algorithms for such heterogeneous energy systems. The platform can simulate a large number of buildings, including their internal energy supply and energy conversion systems, in combinati- on with external energy supply systems, such as the electrical grid. Furthermore, the platform allows sophisticated control and energy management algorithms for multi-energy sys- tems to be integrated and their performance to be assessed.
MESCOS consists of three layers, each one responsible for simulating one functional subsystem, here the Building Energy Systems (BESs), the energy networks and the Dis- tribution Management System (DMS) as shown in Figure 1. The platform has a modular structure, which allows domain specific simulators to be incorporated. Commercial off-the- shelf simulators have been used within the Control and the Network layers, whereas a custom parallel-execution framework (PEF) has been developed for the Entity layer. This framework exploits the parallel processing capabilities of modern multi-core PC systems which are used for simulating hundreds of instances of BESs. The BESs are modelled using Modelica and integrated into the PEF via C-Code export.
The capability to perform simulations of a large number of individual BES and the energy supply infrastructure supports the development of novel control and energy management algorithms. For example, algorithms for coor- dinating the operation of electro-thermal heating systems like electrical heaters (EH), heat pumps (HPs) and combined heat and power (CHP) systems could be simulated under realistic boundary conditions. MESCOS allows for assessing the impact of the developed algorithms on the operation of the energy supply infrastructure. Furthermore, due to the simulation of the thermal behaviour of each individual BES, the comfort of the residents can be evaluated.