Streamlined Deployment of a Distributed and Scalable Co-Simulation Platform for Integrated Energy Systems

To reach decarbonisation goals, energy systems are becoming increasingly complex and deeply integrated with other sectors and activities through digital technologies such as Big Data analytics and Digital Twins. In recent years, co-simulation has become a powerful technique to study complex cyber-physical integrated energy systems. Indeed, co-simulation enables the coupling of diverse simulators, each specialised in modelling a specific aspect of the system, to provide a comprehensive understanding of its behaviour. As the simulation scenarios grow in scale and complexity, they require more extensive compute infrastructures to scale horizontally. Yet, deploying and operating co-simulation platforms in distributed computing infrastructures remains a difficult task. This paper explores the challenges faced in achieving scalable co-simulation through horizontal distribution using cluster/cloud deployments, both in terms of engineering complexity for deploying and operating co-simulation platforms and in terms of absolute performance and scalability. It proposes a novel framework to streamline the process of deploying and operating complex co-simulation scenarios in cloud environments. The framework adopts established methodologies in engineering software solutions in the cloud to deploy and operate co-simulations. Specifically, it adopts containerisation technologies to decouple the definition of the simulation scenario from the execution infrastructure, automating and abstracting away distribution and deployment concerns and allowing seamless migration to different computing infrastructures. An initial assessment of absolute performance and scalability of realistic co-simulation scenarios within the proposed framework shows the benefits of horizontal scaling but also the performance bottlenecks introduced by current technologies for orchestrating simulators.