In the TREIN project, a collaboration with, amongst others, Gasunie, KEMA, the Technical University of Eindhoven and the University of Amsterdam, the future of energy distribution infrastructure for electricity, gas and heat is investigated with special attention to distributed technologies like combined heating and electricity production.
For this project, DySI has developed an accurate and high performance simulation engine intended to study energy distribution needs in residential areas. The simulator is designed specifically to perform “parameter space” searches where multiple variables can be varied simultaneously like building materials, resident behaviour, household appliances, the introduction of new heating technologies etc. .
The engine itself is designed as a generic heatflow simulator developed in MATLAB. The implementation as a generic simulator allowed for many optimisations applied while at simultaneously ensuring maximum reusability. The result is a high-performance simulator that scales well and performs beyond the customer's expectations.
A separate front-end application is used to configure the heat-flow and heat-sources for houses and to define ensembles of building-resident-behaviour combinations.
DySI has actively advised in the definition of this two layer architecture that cleanly separates the generic simulation core from a versatile front-end that offers broad possibilities to meet wide-ranging research goals.