Research

Demo abstract: Flexhouse-2-an open source building automation platform with a focus on flexible control

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Abstract

Electricity grids in many countries are facing the challenge of having to integrate an increasing amount of fluctuating power production from renewable resources. This creates a need for additional flexibility in the operation of the grid. In particular, the provision of power system services from distributed energy resources (DER) has been a strong focus of smart grid research in recent years. These resources include building-integrated generation such as photovoltaics, loads capable of demand response (DR) and local energy storage. A large portion of these resources will be installed in or on buildings, and most of these resources will not be communicating directly with the smart grid; in order to allow internal coordination and optimization of resource use at building level, a building automation platform will act as an intermediary. Such a platform must be easy to adapt to the multitude of communication standards that exist both for the internal and external interfaces. It must be able to coordinate the operation of building-level controllers with that of external control signals such as those required for smart grid control. New building-level controllers and their associated user interfaces must be easy to deploy on a running platform without sacrificing robustness. Finally, the actions of the platform and those of the controllers deployed on it must be traceable to allow for the verification of service delivery. In this demonstration we will introduce the Flexhouse-2 software platform, an open-source implementation of a building automation system which has been designed with a strong focus on enabling the integration of the building into a smart power system and dedicated support for the requirements of an R&D environment. We will demonstrate the need for such a platform, discuss the requirements in detail, give an overview of the software architecture and working principles and close with the presentation of an implementation in several buildings.