Coupling OMNeT++ and mosaik for integrated Co-Simulation of ICT-reliant Smart Grids

Abstract: The increasing integration of renewable energy resources requires so-called smart grid services for monitoring, control and automation tasks. Simulation environments are vital for evaluating and developing innovative solutions and algorithms. Especially in smart energy systems, we face a variety of heterogeneous simulators representing, e.g., power grids, analysis or control components and markets. The co-simulation framework mosaik can be used to orchestrate the data exchange and time synchronization between individual simulators. So far, the underlying communication infrastructure has often been assumed to be optimal and therefore, the influence of e.g., communication delays has been neglected. This paper presents the first results of the project cosima, which aims at connecting the communication simulator OMNeT++ to the co-simulation framework mosaik to analyze the resilience and robustness of smart grid services, e.g., multi-agent-based services with respect to adaptivity, scalability, extensibility and usability. This facilitates simulations with realistic communication technologies (such as 5G) and the analysis of dynamic communication characteristics by simulating multiple messages. We show the functionality and benefits of cosima in experiments with 50 agents.