An OPC UA-based Energy Management Platform for Multi-Energy Prosumers in Districts

Abstract

Control and optimization in smart energy systems rely heavily on mathematical models of power system engineers. Simultaneously, software engineers that create control and monitoring systems are faced with questions for designing appropriate system interfaces, such that different kinds of interaction schemes are supported. Often, the data specifications required by the interfaces are implicitly available within the mathematical models. Moreover, control and optimization schemes sometimes require data to be transferred to be able to operate. Despite these synergies, these tasks are generally treated separately. In this work, we aim to reduce the gap between those activities to facilitate the development of interactive and collaborative systems. We model a system consisting of multiple buildings and multiple energy networks to optimize their operation. We work with the model in a follow up step to create an industrially applicable interface that relies on the OPC UA communication protocol, which is widely used in industry and is easily integrated in modern SCADA systems. We finally demonstrate the application of the proposed approach using a co-simulation.