This document describes the preparatory work for the development of an ICT architecture capable of managing a local energy community by integrating real resources, such as the PREVO laboratory and the RSE corporate electric car fleet, and simulated subjects, such as other domestic utilities and service providers.

The technologies and architecture used to connect the different players involved will then be presented, as well as the adaptation work conducted on the existing infrastructure.

Since the management of an energy community requires knowledge of the consumption of each energy vector used by each utility, the PREVO laboratory was equipped with a system for detecting water and gas consumption. For instantaneous electric power, the threshold mechanism that the second-generation electronic meter uses to send the read power measurements to the user device was analyzed, in order to evaluate the impact of the choice of the values of these thresholds on the Chain 2 channel traffic and on the resolution of the consumption profile communicated to the user.

The need to develop a monitoring system for the charging of the company’s vehicle fleet has created the opportunity to integrate electric vehicles within the energy community, so as to constitute a further element of flexibility through the modulation of the charging setpoint of each vehicle. To this end, the same software platform for monitoring the PREVO laboratory was used. Similarly, in the future, virtual utilities will also be connected to the same platform, so as to have a common access point to all the resources constituting the energy community.

The provision of services ─such as production and consumption forecasts, electricity purchase and sale rates and local energy management systems─ by third parties to the users of the energy community will be developed through a microservice architecture. This document shows how a communication based on the exchange of MQTT messages is able to fulfill this task, developing a first user simulator whose data are communicated in real time to a third party with this modality.

The simulation of the virtual utilities of the energy community, both from the point of view of electricity exchanges and information exchanges, involves the creation of a virtual information network using the OpenStack framework present in RSE’s IoT & BigData laboratory. Virtual machines will be connected to the network, each dedicated to a service provider, while the simulation of utilities will take advantage of the virtualization mechanism offered by the Docker platform.