Mosaik is Open Source

Since nearly four years, we’ve been developing and working with mosaik within our research group at OFFIS. Now, we finally have the opportunity to release it as Open Source Software.

Before mosaik was developed, we manually combined results of different simulators with Excel to gain some knowledge about the interaction of active components of smart grids.

We soon realized, that this was not the way to go and started the project “mosaik – modulare Simulation aktiver Komponenten im Verteilnetz” (which roughly translates to “modular simulation of active components in the distribution grid”).

Our first prototype hard coded some simulators (for photovoltaic, electric vehicles and load flow analysis) in an event loop. This beast already allowed us to perform some interesting simulations within the Grid Surfer project.

My former colleague Steffen Schütte then began his PhD-thesis about coupling existing simulators and creating large-scale Smart Grid scenarios. During that period, we created mosaik 1. With this, we really made a big step forward and were able to simulate scenarios with several simulator types, more than hundred simulator instances and more than seventy thousand simulated entities.

Mosaik 1, as a project that was created during a PhD-thesis, had its problems, though. It was hard to maintain because it used too many different technologies from both, the Python and the Java world. It had some features that seemed useful by that time but turned out to be not that important. On the other hand, extending the scenario description language (mosl), which was an Xtext based DSL, proved to be too hard and inflexible.

So with everything we learned during the development of mosaik 1, we started from scratch at the end of last year and created mosaik 2. It still lacks some of the features of mosaik 1, but is already usable in a much more comfortable manner than mosaik ever was.

We hope that by making it Open Source, we can reach a broader audience and more Users and build up a vibrant community. With mosaik 2 we hope to initiate collaborative projects with other institutes and experts from different disciplines to simulate the effects of various control strategies within extensive energy systems of tomorrow.