Co-simulation Workflow for the Dynamic Modelling and Simulation of Large-scale District Energy Systems

With the increasing complexity of urban energy systems, the requirements for modelling and simulation methods have increased. Co-simulation is a promising approach for carrying out system simulations, in which the respective sub systems are modelled using tailored tools. This paper presents a workflow for dynamic simulation of large-scale district energy systems introducing three main improvements compared to the state of the art: i) The data preparation was carried out using Vectorworks and QGIS; ii) A novel pipe-laying algorithm with grid dimensioning is introduced; iii) A co-simulation framework was applied to assess energy supply variations. The tools Dymola, IDA ICE and TRNSYS are thus coupled using cosimulation. The framework was applied on a virtual district: Different energy supply strategies were compared and the temperature increase due to global warming on the energy supply was investigated.