Siemens Energy Helps Drive Global Energy Transition with Model-Based Design
The Approach Reshapes Development and Testing of Energy Systems
“With our investment in Model-Based Design, we have come up with a new way of parallel project execution called reference project lines.… Reference project lines aim to deliver a highly customized solution by standardizing the essentials of each project, allowing for more predictable and efficient project delivery.”
Key Outcomes
- Established an organization-wide engineering environment where all teams model and simulate control designs before generating code for target hardware platforms
- Enabled earlier testing and operator training with electrical plant digital twins
- Developed reusable reference project lines to enable greater scalability with parallel project execution
Engineers at Siemens Energy are focused on implementing solutions to enable the transition toward carbon-neutral energy production. Meeting this challenge means addressing the energy trilemma, which involves balancing the affordability, reliability, and sustainability of energy systems. It requires expanding the share of renewables in the energy mix, making better use of existing infrastructure, and strengthening the grid, for example, with new active grid elements and HVDC technology that reduces transmission losses over long distances.
To achieve this, Siemens Energy is using Model-Based Design to transform its engineering ecosystem. “We took the latest state-of-the-art software development techniques and combined them with Model-Based Design to rethink how we develop, test, and integrate power energy systems,” says Jens Dietrich at Siemens Energy. The result is a control development environment that supports hardware independence, enables a strong focus on system engineering, and puts automation at the center of builds and regression testing.
Using this approach, Siemens Energy teams have reshaped how power energy systems are developed, tested, and integrated over the past eight years. The engineering ecosystem enables Siemens to support parallel project execution, automate CI/CD pipelines, and use digital twins based in Simulink® to both test designs early and facilitate cloud-based operator training.