Section: Bilateral Contracts and Grants with Industry

Bilateral Contracts with Industry: Inria-EDF Strategic action MS4SG

Participants : Laurent Ciarletta, Yannick Presse.

Vincent Chevrier and Julien Vaubourg (MAIA team, LORIA) are external collaborators.

The MS4SG (multi-simulation for smart grids) project is part of a strategic action between Inria and EDF. It is a joint work between the Madynes and MAIA teams from Inria-NGEt and EDF R&D.

The aim of the project is to provide primitives based on AA4MM in order to enable the multi-modeling and the multi-simulation of smart-grids.

Smart grids are energy power grids (electricity) endowed with smart capabilities because of the use of information and communication technologies. It can be seen as a combination of at least 3 layers : the power grid, the network used to collect information and control the system and an Information System. In Smart-grids, power/electricity utilities and distributors have to deal with multiple and variable sources of energy and of errors, the mandatory integration of smaller energy providers and a very variable set of users, while maintaining the necessary quality of service. All this at a scale than can be as big as a country. The IT+Network layers add the needed « smart » to allow dynamic adaptation of the different components and help forecast and therefore pilot the entire system. Smart grids correspond to new challenges because it is needed to re-think the way electricity is supplied to customers.

The idea behind MS4SG is to use simulation to help develop and evaluate future grids architectures, novel supervision techniques and to eventually control these systems. Instead of building a « super simulator ». Our approach is stemming from our AA4MM work, and consists in integrating simulators (and models) coming from at least the following initial different domains: electrical networks, communication networks and information systems. As these domains can influence each other, smart-grids can be considered as a kind of complex system and we are faced with multi-modeling and multi-simulation issues. Models in these simulators (and therefore simulators) are heterogeneous (at least equation based and event based models). In addition, each domain has developed is own set of software that should ideally be reused.