Intelligent energy systems ontology to support markets and power systems co-simulation interoperability

Abstract

The significant changes the electricity sector has been suffering in the latest decades increased the complexity and unpredictability of power and energy systems (PES). To deal with such a volatile environment, different software tools are available to simulate, study, test, and support the decisions of the various entities involved in the sector. However, being developed for specific subdomains of PES, these tools lack interoperability with each other, hindering the possibility to achieve more complex and complete simulations, management, operation and decision support scenarios. This paper presents the Intelligent Energy Systems Ontology (IESO), which provides semantic interoperability within a society of multi-agent systems (MAS) in the frame of PES. It leverages the knowledge from existing and publicly available semantic models developed for specific domains to accomplish a shared vocabulary among the agents of the MAS society, overcoming the existing heterogeneity among the reused ontologies. Moreover, IESO provides agents with semantic reasoning, constraints validation, and data uniformization. The use of IESO is demonstrated through a case study that simulates the management of a distribution grid, considering the validation of the network’s technical constraints. The results demonstrate the applicability of IESO for semantic interoperability, reasoning through constraints validation, and automatic units’ conversion. IESO is publicly available and accomplishes the pre-established requirements for ontology sharing.