pnnl/cst repository overview

CoSim Toolbox Overview Co-simulation is an analysis technique that allows multiple simulation tools, generally from different domains, to exchange data during runtime. This allows the development of larger and/or more complex models than what a single simulation tool traditionally covers. HELICS is a co-simulation platform developed under funding from the United States Department of Energy (summary paper and documentation). HELICS has been used various studies such as those evaluating a transactive retail market in power systems, evaulating the roles of distributed power inverters on power system frequency response, and cyber-security analysis of power system. Due to its origins as a power system tool, many of the existing studies are connected to that domain but HELICS itself is domain agnostic and is suitable for use in any time-series simulation.

CoSim Toolbox (CST) is a suite of Dockerized tools and libraries that make it easier to build, run, and analyze any HELICS-based co-simulations, particularly where new simulation tools written in Python are being developed. Some of these tools CST provides are web-based services (e.g. databases for storing configuration and simulation data) and some of these are simulation tools themselves. Additionally, CST provides a Python HELICS federate class that makes writing a HELICS federate easier and provides access to some CST functionality with no additional coding.