Towards a Model-Driven Framework for Energy Community Digital Twins

Abstract

Energy communities (ECs) are increasingly recognized as a mechanism for integrating distributed renewable generation, reducing emissions, and enhancing local resilience. However, realizing their full potential requires sophisticated engineering and operational support along their lifecycle. While digital twin (DT) approaches for ECs have been proposed, they fall short of exploiting model-driven engineering (MDE) techniques—in particular, model transformations—even though MDE has proven effective for DT engineering in other domains. To address this, we present a six-step model-driven process that constructs a central EC system model and automatically transforms it into DT service models. The approach is demonstrated for an EC DT simulation service within the Austrian Twin2Share research project, where EC components are mapped to Functional Mock-up Units (FMUs) and interconnected via co-simulation. A scenario-based evaluation on a demo EC with two participants and five devices shows that the transformation executes in under 3 ms, with scaling behavior that is slightly super-linear.