Benchmarking of available flexibility management tools for REII

As part of the BAMBOO project objectives, a holistic Decision Support System tool will be developed that will allow valorization of industrial flexibility such as waste streams recycling, fuel switching or electrical load shifting. The DSS tool shall gather energy market scenarios, material flows characterization, waste heat flows assessment, fuel and raw material prices forecast, investment recommendations as well as plant scheduling and planning, in a cross-sectorial solution.
In order to make the most out of this development and integrate innovative features, an initial benchmarking analysis has been performed of selected existing commercial tools allowing to valorize an industrial site flexibility. Initially, a broad gathering of potentially relevant tools has been made from web research and knowledge sharing with the project consortium partners. From these many tools, the most relevant ones were selected considering the objectives of BAMBOO DSS tool. Three solutions were selected at that stage for further analysis: N-SIDE Enertop (which is the basis upon which BAMBOO DSS tool will be developed), ABB cpmPlus Energy Manager and Artelys Crystal Industry.
For each of these tools, an analysis of functionalities and features was performed based on publicly available information, as detailed as possible considering the limitation of information. These analyses served as basis for a benchmarking of these tools’ features, comparing N-SIDE Enertop to the other two platforms. From this comparison, the most innovative and relevant features to be added to Enertop in the development of BAMBOO DSS tool were identified: direct data connection, dashboards and flexible timescales, amongst other examples.