Deliverable summary
The main purpose of this document is to describe the requirements and initial design and implementation of the GreenCharge simulation and visualisation tools. The purpose of these tools is to enable investigation of the possible impacts of the GreenCharge concepts beyond what is possible with the pilots realised in the project alone. To achieve this, we need to simulate scenarios involving larger and more diverse energy smart neighbourhoods than realised in the pilots. This is based partly on data collected by the pilots and partly on data collected in other contexts.
The GreenCharge simulator builds on a simulation tool developed by a previous FP7 project (CoSSMic). However, to satisfy the requirements of GreenCharge it had to be extended in several aspects:
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– support for simulating additional energy consuming devices (charging EVs, heating/cooling devices) and electric energy storage devices.
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– support for simulating business models for the fair sharing of benefits among stakeholders.
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– support for visualising and analysing the results have to be adapted for the set of KPIs defined for the evaluation of the GreenCharge concept.
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– support for better insight into the working of the optimisation algorithm to build confidence in its correctness and enable improvements
In this initial step we have focused on capturing the requirements, developing an overall design and implementing necessary changes to the simulation framework to accommodate the extended capabilities listed above.
The deliverable, after defining the role of simulation in the project evaluation methodology and after having described the baseline of the CoSSMic project, illustrates in detail the software requirements of the simulator, the software architecture and the technologies on which its implementation is based.
Finally, the first test simulation scenarios have been defined using some of the Use Cases foreseen in the Project Pilots as a reference model.