Envisioning a Collaborative Energy System Planning Platform for the Energy Transition at the District Level

Residential and commercial buildings account for more than one-third of global energy-related greenhouse gas emissions. Integrated multi-energy systems at the district level are a promising way to reduce green house gas emissions by exploiting economies of scale and synergies between energy sources. Planning
district energy systems comes with many challenges in an ever-changing environment. Computational mod elling established itself as the state-of-the-art method for district energy system planning. Unfortunately, it is still cumbersome to combine standalone models to generate insights that surpass their original purpose.
Ideally, planning processes could be solved by using modular tools that easily incorporate the variety of competing and complementing computational models. Our contribution is a vision for a collaborative devel opment and application platform for multi-energy system planning tools at the district level. We present chal lenges of district energy system planning identified in the literature and evaluate whether this platform can help to overcome these challenges. Further, we propose a toolkit that represents the core technical elements of the platform. Lastly, we discuss community management and its relevance for the success of projects with collaboration and knowledge sharing at their core.