Holonic architectures for IoT-empowered energy management in districts

For the future energy system, the transition from centralized fossil-based plants to a sustainable energy system means the emergence of a huge number of distributed renewable energy sources. Weather-dependent and volatile power generation as well as an increasingly spiky electric demand, arising from ongoing electrification of other sectors, require predictive and flexible control strategies already on the district level. With an increasing number of IoT-enabled field devices, multiple energy vectors thereby lead to a complex interplay, where micro and macro objectives may sometimes differ or even oppose. In this work we propose holonic whole-part architectures for multi-energy management systems. Building up a district’s energy system from self-sufficient sub-units, enables the preservation of local control schemes and reduces complexity for energy management entities or energy markets on hierarchically higher levels. Additionally, resilience and topological flexibility can be enhanced through dynamic reconfiguration of the holons. Two field examples for cross-sector realizations of IoT-based multi-energy management in districts are presented, which demonstrate the implementation of the concept once at the district level and once at the device level.