District Heating is a tool written by Mels Habold for his internship at ZEnMo. This tool creates a digital twin of a neighbourhood (in this case Apeldoorn Noord or in Rotterdam) and allows the user to play around with some buttons which change the energy dependencies of this neighbourhood. This tool utilizes code from a lot of different other tools created by ZEnMo, but mostly it looks at the impact of having a heating network in your neighbourhood as opposed to having local boilers.
This tool is based in the Agent Based Language called Anylogic, which combines a visual mode of programming with javascript. Installment can be done by installing Anylogic via their site. Warning, a student licence is needed.
Data can be loaded via https://mapeditor.hesi.energy/editor# (need an account)
draw an area and rightclick and 'press request BAG building' to load BAG data
Not all buildings are loaded, these can be handdrawn by selecting building, drawing polygons and filling in extra building information.
Make sure you add an BuildingUnit to the buildings Asset with the right info in it
Add a HeatNetwork, HeatingDemand and ElectricityDemand somewhere
The HeatNetwork must be placed at the point where the central pipe will be split off into the individual pipes
Add a heater (like BiomassHeater) for the HeatNetwork and place it on its wanted location. The same goes for HeatStorage
Save and add file to folder where District-heating is. Make sure the file name corresponds to the one found in f_startupESDLimporter
This tool looks at the costs (both investing and operational) and environmental impacts. Additionally, the tool also has modelled the energy needs of industries, whereas normally it only looks at households. It is also possible to download objects from ESDL (specifically the Map editor). The tool consists of an underlying model and a graphical interface layerd above it.
More information about the underlying model can be found in the internship report.
The code consist of District-heating.alp and District-heating-UI.alp. The former is the model with all the code of actions, the latter contains graphical elements that together create the graphical model. In the main there are also a lot of .esdl files. These files contain data that is downloaded via the mapeditor (ESDL) and that can be imported via the ESDL-importer (https://github.com/HMels/ESDL-importer). There are also a lot of images in the file. These are to be used to make the model more graphically understandable, and therefore are not to be deleted.