Principles of Building Digital Twins to Design Integrated Energy Systems

The design of integrated energy systems (IESs) is a challenging task by reason of the highly complex configurations of these systems, the wide range of equipment used, and a diverse set of mathematical models and dedicated software employed to model it. The use of digital twins allows modeling in virtual space for various IES configurations. As a result, an optimal option of IES is obtained, which is implemented in the construction or expansion of a real-world IES. The paper proposes the principles of building digital twins for solving the IES design problems. The paper presents a new methodological approach developed by the authors to design an IES with the help of its digital twin. This approach includes the following components: the architecture of the software platform to create digital twins, a set of technologies and tools to implement the platform, methods to automatically construct a digital twin based on the Model-Driven Engineering concept, an algorithm to design an IES based on its digital twin, and principles to organize a computational process using a multi-agent approach. The results of the computational experiment using the software implementation of the IES digital twin components are presented for a test energy supply scheme.