Modeling resilient multi-energy systems for rural, remote, and disadvantaged communities: A review

In 2022, the IBPSA Board of Directors approved the formation of the IBPSA Modelica Working Group, https://ibpsa.github.io/modelica-working-group/. Its purpose is to further develop the Modelica IBPSA Library, and to coordinate the needs of the IBPSA community with the Modelica community using the earlier work of IBPSA project 1 and IEA-EBC Annex 60 as a starting point.

This paper gives an overview of the Modelica IBPSA Library (https://github.com/ibpsa/modelica-ibpsa), an open-source, free library of component models for building and district energy systems that is implemented in the Modelica language, an open-standard language for modeling of engineered systems. The paper describes the main recent developments of models for heat pumps, geothermal borefields, aquifer thermal energy storage systems, reduced-order building models, ground-coupled district network pipes, controls modeling based on the emerging ASHRAE Standard 231P, and electrical system simulation. It explains how the library is developed and validated, and how it is being used by the four Modelica libraries that use the Modelica IBPSA Library as its core, namely the AixLib, Buildings, BuildingSystems and IDEAS libraries. Modelica uniquely enables cross domain simulations that can couple electrical, fluid, thermal and other types of models. The paper will close with brief examples that show the range of applications supported by these four libraries that integrate some of the newly developed models.