EMSx: a numerical benchmark for energy management systems

TL;DR

EMSx is a comprehensive, publicly available benchmark suite designed to evaluate control algorithms for managing microgrids with renewable energy sources, facilitating research and development in energy management systems.

Contribution

The paper introduces EMSx, a novel benchmark combining datasets, a mathematical framework, and software tools for testing microgrid control algorithms in a standardized way.

Findings

Standard control methods tested on EMSx show varying performance.

EMSx enables reproducible and comparable evaluation of control strategies.

The benchmark supports diverse microgrid configurations and control approaches.

Abstract

Inserting renewable energy in the electric grid in a decentralized manneris a key challenge of the energy transition. However, at local scale, both production and demand display erratic behavior, which makes it delicate to match them. It is the goal of Energy Management Systems (EMS) to achieve such balance at least cost. We present EMSx, a numerical benchmark for testing control algorithms for the management of electric microgrids equipped with a photovoltaic unit and an energy storage system. EMSx is made of three key components: the EMSx dataset, provided by Schneider Electric, contains a diverse pool of realistic microgrids with a rich collection of historical observations and forecasts; the EMSx mathematical framework is an explicit description of the assessment of electric microgrid control techniques and algorithms; the EMSx software EMSx.jl is a package, implemented in the Julia language, which enables to easily implement a microgrid controller and to test it. All components of the benchmark are publicly available, so that other researchers willing to test controllers on EMSx may reproduce experiments easily. Eventually, we showcase the results of standard microgrid control methods, including Model Predictive Control, Open Loop Feedback Control and Stochastic Dynamic Programming.