The intermittent energy supply from distributed resources and the coupling of different energy and application sectors play an important role for future energy systems. Novel operational concepts require the use of widespread and reliable Information and Communication Technology (ICT). This paper presents the approach of a research project that focuses on the development of an innovative operational concept for a Smart Integrated Energy System (SIES), which consists of a physical architecture, ICT and energy management strategies. The cellular approach provides the architecture of the physical system in combination with Transactive Control (TC) as the system’s energy management framework. Independent dynamic models for each component, the physical and digital system, operational management and market are suggested and combined in a newly introduced co-simulation platform to create a holistic model of the integrated energy system. To verify the effectiveness of the operational concept, energy system scenarios are derived and evaluation criteria are suggested which can be employed to evaluate the future system operations.

The concept of cellular energy systems of the German Association for Electrical, Electronic & Information Technologies (VDE) proposes sector coupled energy networks for energy transition based on cellular structures. Its decentralized control approach radically differs from that of existing networks. Deeply integrated information and communications technologies (ICT) open opportunities for increased resilience and optimizations. The exploration of this concept requires a comprehensive simulation tool. In this paper, we investigate simulation techniques for cellular energy systems and present a concept based on co-simulation. We combine simulation tools developed for different domains. A classical tool for studying physical aspects of energy systems (Modelica, TransiEnt library) is fused with a state-of-the-art communication networks simulator (OMNeT++) via the standardized functional mock-up interface (FMI). New components, such as cell managers, aggregators, and markets, are integrated via remote procedure calls. A special feature of our concept is that the communication simulator coordinates the co-simulation as a master and integrates other components via a proxy concept. Model consistency across different domains is achieved by a common description of the energy system. Evaluation proves the feasibility of the concept and shows simulation speeds about 20 times faster than real time for a cell with 111 households.