PEMT-CoSim: A Co-Simulation Platform for Packetized Energy Management and Trading in Distributed Energy Systems

The integration of Internet-of-Things, artificial intelligence, and other emerging technologies is driving the transition from traditional electricity consumers to energy prosumers in smart grids. To encourage flexible participation of prosumers in decentralized/distributed power management and trading, packetized energy (PE) technology is developed to manage prosumers' load and distributed energy resources in a request-reply way by encapsulating the energy into modulated, routable, and trackable electric packets of fixed duration and/or power for PE management (PEM) and trading (PET). To facilitate the research on PE and investigate PE-related problems in real-world environments, this paper proposes a co-simulation platform called PEMT-CoSim based on the Transactive Energy Simulation Platform (TESP) for PEM and PET, which integrates PE into the management for prosumers in distribution systems by developing a dedicated Application Programming Interfaces (API) for PEM and PET. We validate our simulation platform through PEM and PET case studies to showcase how to manage the power packages with prosumers' active participation in distributed energy systems. We also make the proposed platform open-source to encourage researches in PE for smart grids.