---
title: "Open energy system models"
chunk: 6/16
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_energy_system_models"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T03:49:30.157219+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

pandapower is a power system analysis and optimization program being jointly developed by the Energy Management and Power System Operation research group, University of Kassel and the Department for Distribution System Operation, Fraunhofer Institute for Energy Economics and Energy System Technology (IEE), both of Kassel, Germany. The codebase is hosted on GitHub and is also available as a package. The project maintains a website, an emailing list, and online documentation. pandapower is written in Python. It uses the pandas library for data manipulation and analysis and the PYPOWER library  to solve for power flow. Unlike some open source power system tools, pandapower does not depend on proprietary platforms like MATLAB.
pandapower supports the automated analysis and optimization of distribution and transmission networks. This allows a large of number of scenarios to be explored, based on different future grid configurations and technologies. pandapower offers a collection of power system elements, including: lines, 2-winding transformers, 3-winding transformers, and ward-equivalents. It also contains a switch model that allows the modeling of ideal bus-bus switches as well as bus-line/bus-trafo switches. The software supports topological searching. The network itself can be plotted, with or without geographical information, using the matplotlib and plotly libraries.
A 2016 publication evaluates the usefulness of the software by undertaking several case studies with major distribution system operators (DSO). These studies examine the integration of increasing levels of photovoltaics into existing distribution grids. The study concludes that being able to test a large number of detailed scenarios is essential for robust grid planning. Notwithstanding, issues of data availability and problem dimensionality will continue to present challenges.
A 2018 paper describes the package and its design and provides an example case study. The article explains how users work with an element-based model (EBM) which is converted internally to a bus-branch model (BBM) for computation. The package supports power system simulation, optimal power flow calculations (cost information is required), state estimation (should the system characterization lacks fidelity), and graph-based network analysis. The case study shows how a few tens of lines of scripting can interface with pandapower to advance the design of a system subject to diverse operating requirements. The associated code is hosted on GitHub as jupyter notebooks.
As of 2018, BNetzA, the German network regulator, is using pandapower for automated grid analysis. Energy research institutes in Germany are also following the development of pandapower.

=== PowerMatcher ===

The PowerMatcher software implements a smart grid coordination mechanism which balances distributed energy resources (DER) and flexible loads through autonomous bidding. The project is managed by the Flexiblepower Alliance Network (FAN) in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. The project maintains a website and the source code is hosted on GitHub. As of June 2016, existing datasets are not available. PowerMatcher is written in Java.
Each device in the smart grid system – whether a washing machine, a wind generator, or an industrial turbine – expresses its willingness to consume or produce electricity in the form of a bid. These bids are then collected and used to determine an equilibrium price. The PowerMatcher software thereby allows high shares of renewable energy to be integrated into existing electricity systems and should also avoid any local overloading in possibly aging distribution networks.

=== Power TAC ===

Power TAC stands for Power Trading Agent Competition. Power TAC is an agent-based model simulating the performance of retail markets in an increasingly prosumer- and renewable-energy-influenced electricity landscape. The first version of the Power TAC project started in 2009, when the open source platform was released as an open-source multi-agent competitive gaming platform to simulate electricity retail market performance in smart grid scenarios. The inaugural annual tournament was held in Valencia, Spain in 2012.
Autonomous machine-learning trading agents, or 'brokers', compete directly with each other as profit-maximizing aggregators between wholesale markets and retail customers. Customer models represent households, small and large businesses, multi-residential buildings, wind parks, solar panel owners, electric vehicle owners, cold-storage warehouses, etc. Brokers aim at making profit through offering electricity tariffs to customers and trading electricity in the wholesale market, while carefully balancing supply and demand.
The competition is founded and orchestrated by Professors Wolfgang Ketter and John Collins and the platform software is developed collaboratively by researchers at the Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University Centre for Future Energy Business, the Institute for Energy Economics at the University of Cologne, and the Computer Science department at the University of Minnesota. The platform uses a variety of real-world data about weather, market prices and aggregate demand, and customer behavior. Broker agents are developed by research teams around the world and entered in annual tournaments. Data from those tournaments are publicly available and can be used to assess agent performance and interactions. The platform exploits competitive benchmarking to facilitate research into, among other topics, tariff design in retail electricity markets, bidding strategies in wholesale electricity markets, performance of markets as penetration of sustainable energy resources or electric vehicles is ramped up or down, effectiveness of machine learning approaches, and alternative policy approaches to market regulation. The software has contributed to research topics ranging from the use of electric vehicle fleets as virtual power plants to how an electricity customer decision support system (DSS) can be used to design effective demand response programs using methods such as dynamic pricing.

=== renpass ===