Application of Functional Programming in the Energy Industry: A Local Energy Market Simulator Case Study

This article presents the efforts made to develop a simulator for local energy exchanges by means of an energy marketplace designed as a multi-agent model. The objective of this article is not to focus on EDF’s industrial use case by itself, but to share elements of experience regarding our use of functional programming (FP) in order to create this specific simulator and the generic layers on which it is built. The main contribution of this paper is the proposal of a three-step methodology (modelling, simulation, and exploitation phases) in which FP played a significant role in the translation of an agent-based system model into elements relevant to a simulation engine through different software layers. The developed approach was then validated on the local energy market case study.