Using the Co-Simulation Mosaik for Teaching Energy Informatics

Abstract

Existing techniques in electricity generation, transmission and distribution are currently transformed to foster the integration of a large share of renewable energy generation. Designing the future smart grid poses challenges regarding fluctuating and hardly predictable feed-in, inverse load flow, decentralized load planning and distributed control strategies, decentralized state estimation and many more aspects. To achieve the goal of a smart, fully decentralized grid, also experts from computing science are needed with skill in modeling and simulation, data science, decentralized algorithmic, self-organization aspects and distributed computational intelligence, to handle all the new requirements. Since summer term 2015 a new practical course in energy informatics at the University of Oldenburg has been established to connect different aspects from the energy informatics curriculum into one central theme around the co-simulation framework mosaik. The central theme fosters the sustainable integration of renewable energy. Along this central thread, students are enabled to put subjects from different fields of smart grid engineering into a common context that is founded on a set of selfcontained exercises and tasks. The co-simulation step by step brings everything together and lets the students get hands on many aspects of modeling, simulating, statistical experiment design, control algorithms and their interactions in order to strengthen their understanding of otherwise theoretical and separately taught subjects.