A Multi-Agent framework to evaluate energy flexibility in District Heating networks

Modelling and simulating urban energy facilities and their interactions is becoming a crucial topic in order to better assess policies and decision making in cities. District Heating (DH) is one of the key enabler for energy transition in cities and, in literature, several tools address its analysis and modelling. Usually the focus in analysing energy systems in cities is oriented on the specific fields and thus models and simulation tools are too sectorized and unable to interact in a larger perspective. Therefore, co-simulation paradigm is exponentially gaining attention as well as Multi Agent Systems (MAS). The lack of multidisciplinary approaches holds especially when dealing with DH and the interconnected subsystems that belongs to different domains. Therefore our proposition consists on a MAS-based co-simulation framework to simulate DH system behaviour while easily integrating models of other subsystems (e.g. buildings and storage). We have tested this distributed and modular framework with two case studies to asses a peak reduction strategy exploiting thermal storage. In conclusion, we have showed the flexibility of our tool while analysing benefits of a simple peak reduction strategy.