MERLON

The MERLON project (Integrated Modular Energy Systems and Local Flexibility Trading for Neural Energy Islands), funded under the Horizon 2020 Innovation scheme of the European Commission, started in January 2019 and was completed in April 2022. The final review of the MERLON project was successfully held on the 6th of July 2022.

MERLON’s main objective was the delivery and demonstration of an integrated modular local energy management framework for the holistic operational optimisation of local energy systems. University of Peloponnese and specifically the WMCLab participated throughout the project with activities focusing on the potential of Electric Vehicle (EV) charging points as local energy resources.

In the context of the MERLON project EVs are considered as an additional means for the local energy management and storage system. To this end, the main contribution of WMCLab was the design and delivery of the EV Flexibility Manager (EVFM) engine which served two purposes: the provision of flexibility forecasts as well as specific flexibility requests regarding the EV charging processes.

The EVFM simulation engine was developed in MATLAB; its first version was released in June 2020 and considered a single EV with a main charging point (CP) located in the premises of the EV owner. The main functionalities comprised of:

• forecasts regarding the charging power and EV State-of-Charge (SoC) levels. For the first EVFM version external travel surveys were used to build stochastic models to predict driving behaviors and generate the historical data requirements for the EVFM forecasting functionality.
• delivery options for implementing specific flexibility requests in a 2-hour time window. Depending on the current SoC levels, prediction for the current plug-in session duration and the EV user personalized preferences, the EVFM engine calculates the CP power to meet the request.
• flexibility offers for an 1-hour window. The concept of offered flexibility can be described as the difference between the estimated energy that will be required for charging the EV according to the baseline scenario and the energy that can be transferred (bidirectional option – V2G and G2V) without challenging the driving needs of the EV user.

In the second phase of the project, data coming from three public charging points were made available via the MERLON data management platform, allowing for flexibility forecasts that target specific charging points.

EVFM was further developed to integrate asynchronous communication with other components, based on RESTful web services supporting the json standard. The second version of the EVFM was released in December 2021.

More details can be found in deliverables D6.2 – MERLON Flexibility Profiling Mechanism and Holistic Flexibility Profiles for Prosumers and EVs, and D6.8 - MERLON VPP Configurator and Control Dispatch Module, available at the official MERLON website.