First Experiences with Coupled Dynamic Simulation of Building Energy Systems and the District Heating Network

New distributed simulation environment has been used to simulate the energy flows in a simple case community consisting of four buildings, power plant and a district heating network. Distributing computing task on different computers accelerates the simulation, but simultaneously some time is spent on communication. The tests indicated that a one year energy simulation of a community could be performed within 3.5-10 days of calendar time depending on the time step used. It was also found that the Internet-communication of data takes approximately 20-25 % of the total simulation time. This share may be even higher if simulated case covers frequent energy consumption peaks and simultaneously high degree of accuracy for the results is required. For optimal performance in the future, the models should be able to recognize steep gradients and adjust the time step accordingly.