Reasons behind the project
In recent years, the power system has been undergoing profound transformations, largely driven by the integration of renewable energy sources and the widespread deployment of power electronic devices and interfaces. These changes necessitate new approaches to system operation and control.
To support system operators in managing the power system across a dynamic time window—from day-ahead planning to real-time operation—there is a need to define and develop advanced tools and methods. These will take the form of smart assistants, designed to assist operators in proactive and informed decision-making.
Despite increasing automation, a significant portion of decision-making will continue to rely on human operators in future control rooms. These operators will need to anticipate events, coordinate distributed control actions, take preventive measures, and address coordination challenges related to balancing and congestion management.
To effectively train these future operators, the renovation of existing decision-support tools and the creation of a realistic, high-fidelity environment for testing and training is essential.
This need is addressed through the development of a power system training Digital Twin, a virtual environment designed to simulate complex and critical scenarios. The core of this Digital Twin will be developed as part of the European project TWINEU (Pilot 8), specifically under Task 5.5: A power system training simulator for complex and critical situations.
Project objectives
1. Training System Operators: Improve operator readiness by simulating realistic network scenarios, including power system contingencies and cyber events.
2. Testing New Components: Provide a testbed for software and hardware modules, such as automation systems, and decision-support tools.
3. Scenario Execution & Analysis: Develop a system that plays predefined scenarios, records trainee responses, and enables debriefing.
4. Performance monitoring: Implement Key Performance Indicator (KPI) tracking and logging for post-training analysis.
Project partners
The project now gathers researchers from three universities (TU Delft, Fraunhofer IEE, RWTH Aachen) and RTE.
Project deliverables
- TWINEU reports:
- D5.1 from conceptual use cases to real demonstration – Digital twin grid for cyber-physical resilience (public)
- D5.2 Assessing the cyber and physical resiliene of the grid with TWINEU DT (public)
- French Digital Twin Use Case – Power system training simulator for complex and critical situations (public)
- French demonstrator technical documents:
- Detailed requirements document (private)
- Code:
- Cyber-physical simulator in Dynawo (public)
- SCADA emulator with Powsybl (public)
- modular platform of the power system digital twins (game orchestration, simulation control, and user interaction capabilities through a well-designed API architecture) (private)
