Open Data for Digital Twins

Project description

We will work on completing a project which is called “Open data for digital twins of energy systems”. The NEON research program was created with the idea of working towards solutions for several societal challenges together with partner companies and universities, like TU Eindhoven and more. Their goal is to accelerate the future of energy and mobility.

Commissioned for NEON, DDBL minor company Alpha Vision will approach the problem NEON has within their project. There is a need to improve their simulation models by feeding them with useful and available open data. The open data that NEON looks for, holds information on the energy usage of either industrial sites or households in neighbourhoods. The behaviour of households using different energy sources can be monitored from these data sources.

There is a lot of available data which continuously gets updated by governmental instances. By using this information, the model can produce realistic outcomes of energy usage per area. While there is a lot of data, there are also a lot of un-useful parts that must be filtered. Here lies the challenge of the problem. The problems that NEON is facing are, how can we accelerate the energy transition as much as possible, what do policymakers/provinces need, in what way can open data be useful in the virtual labs and how does this data have to be filtered? Our goal is to enrich the model with open data and inform NEON how this can be done.

Context

NEON is a research program about three societal challenges. These are climate action, renewable energy, and smart and sustainable transport. By combining societal, economic, and technological expertise these challenges can be tackled. This expertise will come from thirty-five researchers from various companies with PhD positions who are focused on making an impact. NEON is collaborated with twenty industry partners, governmental partners, and societal partners. The NEON program is divided into these domains: Sustainable energy, smart and safe mobility, societal integration, and integral models. These domains cover every aspect from chemistry and electrical engineering to law and psychology. NEON can simulate innovative solutions in virtual labs. These are digital twins, what means that there is an exact virtual copy made of a neighbourhood somewhere in the Netherlands where the behaviour of energy in households can be changed by using sustainable energy solutions. These simulations can be sent to governmental agencies so they can invest in sustainable energy. These virtual labs are made by ZEnMo. ZEnMo is a company that focuses on making simulations to get more insight into the energy transition. They use scientific modelling methods and field data to make labs realistic. In this way they get a better grip on complex challenges that lie ahead of the energy transition. This model is going to need a lot of data which comes from open sources. Our goals are to harvest that data, aggregate it and feed it to the model.

Results

During the project, the original goal was to create several examples of flows in which open data could be fed to NEON's simulation model. Three examples have been created in with the use of Python code, in which values were extracted from CBS, added to a calculation if necessary, and reshaped to fit into the input-files for the model.

When researching all the values NEON requires for their model, we discovered that most of them were at the very least, complicated to obtain. This resulted in the idea of researching open data more than originally planned.
An extra goal was set: Informing NEON about the possibilities and challenges that come with their sought after values. In order to reach this goal, a table with every value was formed. The table has been colour-coded to obtainability and filled with possible sources and other details about every individual value. To elaborate, a document with extensive comments has also been added. These results should help NEON accelerate future research and work to reach their goals.