An MQTT Gateway for HIL Testing of Energy Systems

In this paper, we present an MQTT gateway for Hardware-in-the-Loop (HIL) testing of energy systems control solutions. The proposed solution is the result of a workflow that automatise the mapping process between the set points obtained from the controllers, and the corresponding parameters in the simulation model. In the workflow, different MQTT topics are created for each controlled parameter in the simulation model, then the communication flows are generated in the open-source platform Node-RED. The validity of the proposed solution is investigated through its implementation in an HIL co-simulation framework, where a power system is coupled with a low-temperature district heating network and its model predictive control-based controller acting as a device under test.