RT23 | Automated Cyber-Physical Staging Environment for Validating Smart Grid Software Ecosystems

The 2022 Energy Transition Expertise Center (ENTEC) report on Digitalisation of Energy Flexibility identifies distributed flexibility as one of the key players in the energy transition program in Europe. It identifies over 30 business cases ranging from distributed energy resource management systems (DERMS) to virtual power plants (VPP), to energy communities (EC), and vehicle-to-grid (V2G) scenarios. What all these scenarios have in common is the coordination and aggregation of a large number of distributed resources with the goal of providing critical services to the grid. The projections of the same report anticipate that ~60% of all dispatchable renewable energy will be aggregated into VPPs and more than 65 million EVs will use smart charging or be involved in coordinated V2G use-cases before 2050. At the moment, the tools and methodologies required to evaluate this sort of cyber-physical scenarios are severely limited in terms of scalability, as well as lacking suitable interfaces for efficient workflow automatization. In this presentation we will present an approach for automatically building real-time emulations of large scale cyber-physical energy systems. A complete methodology is presented, starting from the system description, continuing with automatic model and interface generation, and finally completing with real-time execution and data acquisition. The intended target application of these setups is the validation of massively distributed smart-grid software applications. The goal is to provide a testing framework that can be integrated in modern software development toolchains. In this manner, complex software ecosystems that act on critical infrastructure can be exhaustively evaluated and validated alongside the system they control, before being deployed in the field.