SEAS Communication Engine: An Extensible, Flexible Wrapper for Co-Simulation Agents

Conference · Wed Sep 18 04:00:00 EDT 2024

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1109/ISGT59692.2024.10454190· OSTI ID:2447808

Helman, Sam; Panda, Kinshuk; Vaidhynathan, Deepthi; Knueven, Bernard; Sigler, Devon; Jones, Wesley; King, Jennifer

When modeling and analyzing the power grid and other large scale systems, researchers often express scenarios as optimization problems and feed them into advanced software solvers. In order to allow multiple solvers to communicate with each other and share data from different domains, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) and associated Department of Energy (DOE) labs have developed a software framework called the Hierarchical Engine for Large-scale Infrastructure Co-Simulation (HELICS). HELICS allows cosimulation via a collection of client libraries for different languages that can be called from the appropriate optimization software. However, these client libraries do not provide a higher level of abstraction beyond reading and writing data off of the shared HELICS bus. In this paper, we describe a new software library called the SEAS Communication Engine that exposes a higher-level API for running cosimulation problems. The SEAS Engine provides a class-based abstraction on top of the Python HELICS client, in order to allow users to implement their domain-specific cosimulations without needing to interact with core HELICS primitives. This will make adoption of HELICS and cosimulation in general easier, by exposing a simpler API. In the second part of the paper, we validate our library on a collection of different simulation examples, including the canonical IEEE 13 Bus Feeder. Lastly, we demonstrate using the SEAS Engine to directly call domain-specific code written in the Julia programming language. Our hope is that this will serve as a template for easily calling software in different programming languages via the SEAS Engine, thereby avoiding code duplication and complexity.

• Research Organization: National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), Golden, CO (United States)
• Sponsoring Organization: USDOE National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), Laboratory Directed Research and Development (LDRD) Program
• DOE Contract Number: AC36-08GO28308; AC36-08GO28308
• OSTI ID: 2447808
• Report Number(s): NREL/PO-2C00-88607; MainId:89386; UUID:d4f122a1-676e-4673-a1ce-01b2369fc82c; MainAdminId:73764
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

ESI
HELICS
HPC
Julia
MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING
Python
SEAS
co-simulation
code
hybrid energy systems
software