SysML Modeling of Digital Twins for Renewable Energy Communities
This work provides an initial exploration for practitioners needing to model heterogeneous REC components, but it is incremental and lacks empirical validation.
The paper addresses the challenge of engineering Digital Twins for Renewable Energy Communities by proposing a Model-Based Systems Engineering workflow using SysML. It re-expresses a house subset in SysML, identifies four semantic gaps, and suggests importing the SAREF4ENER ontology to address them.
Renewable Energy Communities (RECs) are emerging as a key organizational model for local and global sharing of renewable generation, storage, and flexible loads. Engineering Digital Twins of RECs is made difficult by the heterogeneity of devices, contracts, and runtime data involved. In this paper, we take a first step toward a Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) workflow for REC's Digital Twins. Starting from an industrially-validated REC domain model, we re-express a representative house subset in SysML using the open-source Modelio tool, yielding two Block Definition Diagrams - a device taxonomy and a community organizational view. We then discuss four semantic gaps that plain SysML leaves open and sketch how the SAREF4ENER ontology could be imported as a reference package to close them. Combining SysML with SAREF-based semantics for smart-energy Digital Twins remains largely unexplored, and we position this paper as a first step along that line.