Principles and Experiments of a Multi-Agent Approach for Large Co-Simulation Networks Initialization

Simulating large systems, such as smart grids, often requires to build a network of specific simulators. Making heterogeneous simulators work together is a challenge in itself, but recent advances in the field of co-simulation are providing answers. However, one key problem arises, and has not been sufficiently addressed: the initialization of such networks. Many simulators need to have proper input values to start. But in the network, each input is another simulator’s output. One has to find the initial input values of all simulators such as their computed output is equal to the initial input value of the connected simulators. Given that simulators often contain differential equations, this is hard to solve even with a small number of simulators, and nearly impossible with a large number of them. In this paper, we present a mutli-agent system designed to solve the co-simulation initialization problem, and show preliminary results on large networks.