A Distributed Multimodel Platform to Cosimulate Multienergy Systems in Smart Buildings

Nowadays, buildings are responsible for large consumption of energy in our cities. Moreover, buildings can be seen as the smallest entity of urban energy systems. On these premises, in this article, we present a flexible and distributed cosimulation platform that exploits a multimodeling approach to simulate and evaluate energy performance in smart buildings. The developed platform exploits the Mosaik  cosimulation framework and implements the functional mock-up interface standard in order to couple and synchronize heterogeneous simulators and models. The platform combines in a shared simulation environment: 1) the thermal performance of the building simulated with EnergyPlus; 2) a heat pump integrated with a proportional–integral–derivative control strategy modeled in Modelica to satisfy the heating demand of the building; 3) an electrical energy storage system modeled in MATLAB Simulink; and 4) different Python models used to simulate household occupancy, electrical loads, photovoltaic production, and smart meters, respectively. The platform guarantees a plug-and-play integration of models and simulators, in which one or more models can be easily replaced without affecting the whole simulation engine. Finally, we present a demonstration example to test the functionalities, capability, and usability of the developed platform and discuss future developments of our framework.