Digital Twin of Radio-Mesh Smart Meter Communication for Outage Management Using a Multi-Agent System

With more distributed energy resources and electrification of the transport and heating sector, higher loads and more stress are imposed on the consumer side of the power grid, leading to higher fault risks. Therefore, an increasing need for innovative outage management solutions in the low voltage area of the power grid arises. However, testing new outage management methods in real-world power grids involves high risk and complexity. A virtual test environment to simulate outages on the grid can erase this risk and reduce complexity, enabling the development of new and innovative outage management strategies. This paper proposes a digital twin representation of a generalized radio-mesh smart meter network. The digital twin serves as a virtual test environment for further research and development of fault detection and diagnosis methods. As the European commission plans to finish a mass roll-out of smart meters for its member states by 2030, existing smart meter infrastructure is utilized by integrating their currently unused features, such as the last gasp feature. Modeling the radio-mesh network was subject to a variety of complex principles such as communication blind spots, package collision, and limited communication range. A validation of the behavior of the digital twin was carried out by comparing the simulated transmission time of the smart meter packages with transmission time data obtained in an experiment. Identical times were recorded, thus the results confirmed an accurate representation of the real system.