Co-simulation of control for thermal and electrical smart micro grids on a PLC-based testbed

We propose a co-simulation architecture for a campus with multiple buildings equipped with air conditioning (AC) system, photovoltaic (PV) panels and energy storage systems (ESSs). The energy generated by the PV panels, the instantaneous power consumption in the buildings as well as the temperature variations inside the building are simulated, while the exchange of information and the control operations are implemented in hardware on development kits in order to assess the impact of realistic communication and control solutions. The advantage of the co-simulation architecture is the ability to emulate in a short time phenomena that are otherwise slow (such as temperature changes), thus providing a solution for fast prototyping of control and communication architectures for smart grids.We also integrate the control of AC and batteries into a new single control strategy. Main contributions of the paper are: a simplification of both the PV model and the power consumption models present in the literature, the integration of the models for the PV panels, battery, thermal system and power load models into a single simulator, the design of a control and communication architecture for the optimization of the power consumption, the integration of the control of the AC into the battery control. Results obtained with the co-simulation architecture are presented and discussed.