VOLTTRON Testing Tool Kit

Lead Performer: SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory – Menlo Park, CA
Partners:
-- Kisensum – Oakland, CA
-- Pacific Northwest National Laboratory – Richland, WA
DOE Total Funding: $700,000
Cost Share: $175,000
Project Term: October 1, 2016 – September 30, 2018
Funding Type: Building Energy Efficiency Frontiers and Innovations Technologies (BENEFIT) – 2016 (DE-FOA-0001383)
Related Projects: VOLTTRON

Project Objective

Today’s systems integration projects for distributed energy resources (DERs) and microgrid development are either not integrated or costly because they require highly qualified labor to connect expensive equipment and specialized software to coordinate their operation with other assets to achieve multiple objectives. If an operation is designed to achieve a certain objective and the parameters of the objective change over time, the specialized software has to be modified, tested, and made operational again. Open-source integration platforms with strong technical support can reduce behind-the-meter DER integration and operation costs by creating a community of developers that reuse and/or enhance code over time and increase the flexibility of systems by increasing the dynamic response of behind-the-meter systems over time. VOLTTRON is DOE’s open-source execution platform for transactive energy applications. In the buildings space, VOLTTRON allows users to run monitoring and control applications that interface with existing building management systems (BMS), typically smart buildings. In both capacities, VOLTTRON allows for a more effective integration between buildings and the electrical grid. The success of VOLTTRON as an open-source research platform and eventual transition to a commercial platform depends on expanding the community beyond its original set of developers to create a virtuous feedback cycle that can improve VOLTTRON’s capabilities. For this to be accomplished, the source code needs to be easy to use, maintain, and enhance.   

The overall objective of this project is to facilitate adoption and demonstrate the benefits of the VOLTTRON platform for DER management systems. The VOLTTRON Testing Tool Kit (VTTK) will accomplish this by extending the development of the VOLTTRON Open Source platform and enabling lower implementation costs and increased adoption by adding testing tools for both research entities and product companies to test their development against its specifications before productizing their own development. The project team will more than double the size of this community and increase its diversity in order to move VOLTTRON closer to reaching the critical mass required for widespread adoption in the marketplace. 

The development of the VTTK will facilitate interoperability and potentially reduce the cost of DER integration and microgrid projects by providing a packaged simulation framework that can be used for testing new DER agents. Testing currently makes up at least 30% of the total DER integration cost. VTTK will help accelerate successful testing and implementation by new users by contributing DER-specific simulation test suites that will be used to facilitate the development of third-party agents in conjunction with new debugging tools. Through the VTTK effort, the team will enhance existing end-user and developer documentation and take on development of some issues relevant to DER integration in the VOLTTRON repository.

Contacts

DOE Technology Manager: Marina Sofos
Lead Performer: Sila Kiliccote, SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory

Publications