District heating systems are a relevant solution for reducing CO2 emissions, especially in dense areas with older buildings. However, due to the heavy investment costs, there is a great interest in simulation and software solutions to reduce distribution losses, limit the overuse of peak generators and optimize the use of storage capacities. In this paper, we describe how we designed, validated and used a library of fast, precise and robust components for district heating systems. Among other results, we could reduce the number of equations in some components by a factor of 40 and demonstrate more than 10% reduction in heat losses on a sample application.

This paper presents the development of a new advanced control method suitable for variable temperature District Heating Systems (DHS). The proposed controller determines optimal planning for the on/off status and power of the heat generators as well as for the supply temperature and differential pressure at the production plant level. Compared to existing methods, the original features of the developed solution are to fully exploit the thermal storage capacity of the network and to determine the best compromise between pumping costs and heat losses. A numerical case study based on a representative DHS is used to evaluate the method over a heating season (5 months). Results show that our method reduces production costs up to 8.3 % when compared to a more classical controller. Moreover, the observed computing time is compatible with the requirements of the receding time horizon principle, ensuring that the method is tractable on real DHS.

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