Experimenting with Matryoshka Co-Simulation: Building Parallel and Hierarchical FMUs

Abstract

International audienceThe development of complex multi-domain and multi-physic systems, such as Smart Electric Grids, have given rise to new challenges in the simulation domain. These challenges concern the capability to couple multiple domain-specific simulators, and the FMI standard is an answer to this. But they also concern the scalability and the accuracy of the simulation within an heterogenous system. We propose and implement here the concept of a Matryoshka FMU, i.e. a first of its kind FMU compliant with the version 2.0 of the FMI standard. It encapsulates DACCOSIM – our distributed and parallel master architecture – and the FMUs it controls. The Matryoshka automatically adapts its internal time steps to ensure the required accuracy while it is controlled by an external FMU-compliant simulator. We present the JavaFMI tools and the DACCOSIM middleware used in the automatic building process of such Matryoshka FMUs. This approach is then applied on a real-life Distributed Energy System scenario. Regarding the Modelica system simulated in Dymola, improvements up to 250% in terms of computational performance are achieved while preserving the simulation accuracy and enhancing its integration capability