A Highly Configurable Simulator for Assessing Energy Usage

Smart grids provide newer ways of energy production, transmission, and distribution. In a smart grid finer control of electrical devices in household and buildings are implemented to better manage energy demand and supply. However, this finer control commonly known as demand side management (DSM) requires extensive simulation at various levels before a DSM algorithm may actually be deployed in a real building or neighborhood. Since forecasting the energy usage behavior of myriad number of electrical devices is a difficult exercise, simulations are done to assess the effectiveness of a DSM algorithm. The problem with the state-of-the-art simulators is that each is designed for simulating electrical devices’ behavior under specific and limited settings. To this end, we present a highly configurable and extensible smart grid simulator (SGS) that is capable of simulating per-minute granularity of energy usage under numerous settings. Moreover, SGS is able to simulate behavior at four levels: electrical devices, households and buildings, neighborhoods and cities. Given different scenarios SGS can simulate relativistic behavior of energy usage at all four levels.