Engineering Papers⌕ Search

SEARCH · Engineering Papers

Results for “software infrastructure”

Search indexed NASA NTRS and DOE OSTI research on propulsion, heat transfer, battery materials and energy systems. Follow report and document links to the original sources.

Quote a phrase for an exact phrase match. Source license links do not imply unrestricted reuse.

At least 145 records · Page 8
All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
DOE OSTI2021

Enhancing Performance Contracts with Monitoring-Based Commissioning (MBCx)

Integrating monitoring-based commissioning (MBCx) software tools into performance contracts is a timely topic given recent developments in MBCx software offerings and the growing number of MBCx deployments nationwide. Many commercial building owners have started to install MBCx software tools that tie in advanced metering infrastructure, building automation systems, and local weather data to enable ongoing commissioning and identify energy conservation measures. To support federal and commercial building owners in understanding, procuring, and implementing MBCx software tools, this report provides an overview of their capabilities, the MBCx process, and how MBCx can be integrated into - and benefit - each phase of a performance contract. This report is intended to spur increased use of MBCx in performance contracts, whether an agency has previously installed or is considering adding MBCx at the time of their project. Additionally, case studies illustrate successful experiences using MBCx within performance contracts at a university campus and across a large number of buildings managed by the General Services Administration.

32 ENERGY CONSERVATION, CONSUMPTION, AND UTILIZATI↗
DOE OSTI2024

SEAS Communication Engine: An Extensible, Flexible Wrapper for Co-Simulation Agents

When modeling and analyzing the power grid and other large scale systems, researchers often express scenarios as optimization problems and feed them into advanced software solvers. In order to allow multiple solvers to communicate with each other and share data from different domains, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) and associated Department of Energy (DOE) labs have developed a software framework called the Hierarchical Engine for Large-scale Infrastructure Co-Simulation (HELICS). HELICS allows cosimulation via a collection of client libraries for different languages that can be called from the appropriate optimization software. However, these client libraries do not provide a higher level of abstraction beyond reading and writing data off of the shared HELICS bus. In this paper, we describe a new software library called the SEAS Communication Engine that exposes a higher-level API for running cosimulation problems. The SEAS Engine provides a class-based abstraction on top of the Python HELICS client, in order to allow users to implement their domain-specific cosimulations without needing to interact with core HELICS primitives. This will make adoption of HELICS and cosimulation in general easier, by exposing a simpler API. In the second part of the paper, we validate our library on a collection of different simulation examples, including the canonical IEEE 13 Bus Feeder. Lastly, we demonstrate using the SEAS Engine to directly call domain-specific code written in the Julia programming language. Our hope is that this will serve as a template for easily calling software in different programming languages via the SEAS Engine, thereby avoiding code duplication and complexity.

co-simulation↗
DOE OSTI2023

ALTRIOS (Advanced Locomotive Technology and Rail Infrastructure Optimization System) [SWR-22-54]

The Advanced Locomotive Technology and Rail Infrastructure Optimization System (ALTRIOS) is a unique, fully integrated, open-source software tool to evaluate strategies for deploying advanced locomotive technologies and associated infrastructure for cost-effective decarbonization. ALTRIOS simulates freight-demand driven train scheduling, mainline meet-pass planning, locomotive dynamics, train dynamics, energy conversion efficiencies, and energy storage dynamics of line-haul train operations. Because new locomotives represent a significant long-term capital investment and new technologies must be thoroughly demonstrated before deployment, this tool provides guidance on the risk/reward tradeoffs of different technology rollout strategies. An open, integrated simulation tool is invaluable for identifying future research needs and making decisions on technology development, routes, and train selection. ALTRIOS was developed as part of a collaborative effort by a team comprising the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), Southwest Research Institute (SwRI), and BNSF Railway. Python Package: https://pypi.org/project/altrios/ Rust Crate: https://crates.io/crates/altrios-core

Baker, Chad↗
DOE OSTI2023

Hydrogen Extremely Low Probability of Rupture Version 1

SAND2024-08511O The Hydrogen Extremely Low Probability of Rupture (HELPR) software toolkit provides probabilistic fracture assessments of natural gas infrastructure for transporting hydrogen. Using probabilistic sampling and sensitivity analysis—along with engineering fatigue and fracture mechanics— the software develops models that can predict structural integrity measures for natural gas pipelines under stress. Sandia National Laboratories is a multimission laboratory managed and operated by National Technology & Engineering Solutions of Sandia, LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Honeywell International Inc., for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration under contract DE-NA0003525.

Schroeder, Benjamin↗
DOE OSTI2021

AMReX: Block-structured adaptive mesh refinement for multiphysics applications

Block-structured adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) provides the basis for the temporal and spatial discretization strategy for a number of Exascale Computing Project applications in the areas of accelerator design, additive manufacturing, astrophysics, combustion, cosmology, multiphase flow, and wind plant modeling. AMReX is a software framework that provides a unified infrastructure with the functionality needed for these and other AMR applications to be able to effectively and efficiently utilize machines from laptops to exascale architectures. AMR reduces the computational cost and memory footprint compared to a uniform mesh while preserving accurate descriptions of different physical processes in complex multiphysics algorithms. AMReX supports algorithms that solve systems of partial differential equations in simple or complex geometries and those that use particles and/or particle–mesh operations to represent component physical processes. In this article, we will discuss the core elements of the AMReX framework such as data containers and iterators as well as several specialized operations to meet the needs of the application projects. In addition, we will highlight the strategy that the AMReX team is pursuing to achieve highly performant code across a range of accelerator-based architectures for a variety of different applications.

Zhang, Weiqun↗
DOE OSTI2022

High-Accuracy Angle Generator for Angular Calibrations to Support Optical Metrology Laboratories and Light Source Facilities

The overarching vision for this project was to build the most accurate full-rotation angular positioning system in the Americas, and that goal remains. In labs performing similar work, the environment is typically closer to a clean room than an office space, like we had before the upgrades. We are now positioned to achieve our intended result with our upgraded infrastructure, system hardware, calibration techniques, and software. As detailed below, the combination of the pandemic schedule and technical challenges have set us back, but we will continue on the path toward our vision beyond the end of this Phase 2. It’s too important for us, for industry, and for the nation not to do so.

47 OTHER INSTRUMENTATION↗
DOE OSTI2023

ALTRIOS - Advanced Locomotive Technology and Rail Infrastructure Optimization System

The Advanced Locomotive Technology and Rail Infrastructure Optimization System (ALTRIOS) is a unique, fully integrated, open-source software tool to evaluate strategies for deploying advanced locomotive technologies and associated infrastructure for cost-effective decarbonization. ALTRIOS simulates energy conversion and storage dynamics, locomotive and train dynamics, meet-pass planning (detailed train timetabling), and freight-demand-driven train scheduling in a Pareto optimization. Because new locomotives represent a significant long-term capital investment and new technologies must be thoroughly demonstrated before deployment, this tool provides guidance on the risk/reward tradeoffs of different technology rollout strategies. An open, integrated simulation tool will be invaluable for identifying future research needs and making decisions on technology development, routes, and train selection. ALTRIOS development is a collaboration between NREL, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) RailTEC, Southwest Research Institute (SwRI), and BNSF.

ADVANCED PROPULSION SYSTEMS,MATHEMATICS AND COMPUT↗
DOE OSTI2025

FAIR Ecosystems for Science at Scale

High Performance Computing (HPC) centers provide resources to users who require greater scale to “get science done”. They deploy infrastructure with singular hardware architectures, cutting-edge software environments, and stricter security measures as compared with users’ own resources. As a result, users often create and configure digital artifacts in ways that are specialized for the unique infrastructure at a given HPC center. Each user of that center will face similar challenges as they develop specialized solutions to take full advantages of the center’s resources, potentially resulting in significant duplication of effort. Much duplicated effort could be avoided, however, if users of these centers found it easier to discover others’ solutions and artifacts as well as share their own. The FAIR principles address this problem by presenting guidelines focused around metadata practices to be implemented by vaguely defined “communities”; in practice, these tend to gather by domain (e.g. bioinformatics, geosciences, agriculture). Domain-based communities can unfortunately end up functioning as silos that tend both to inhibit sharing of solutions and best practices as well as to encourage fragile and unsustainable improvised solutions in the absence of best-practice guidance. We propose that these communities pursuing “science at scale” be nurtured both individually and collectively by HPC centers so that users can take advantage of shared challenges across disciplines and potentially across HPC centers. We describe an architecture based on the EOSC-Life FAIR Workflows Collaboratory, specialized for use with and inside HPC centers such as the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF), and we speculate on user incentives to encourage adoption. We note that a focus on FAIR workflow components rather than FAIR workflows is more likely to benefit the users of HPC centers.

Wilkinson, Sean [ORNL] (ORCID:0000000214437479)↗
DOE OSTI2022

VAC: A Software Approach to Resilient SCADA Automation

To better secure critical infrastructure, especially power systems, this paper introduces a virtual SCADA automation controller. The automation controller is a gateway into a power subsystem, making it a valuable target for cyber-attacks that could cut it off from the control center and cause a loss of view and control. To prevent this, the Virtual Automation Controller (VAC) is a backup device that mirrors the capabilities of the physical controller. It can communicate via Modbus and DNP3 and is containerized so it can be deployed on a variety of platforms. Furthermore, it utilizes software-defined networking to quickly disconnect a failed automation controller and preserve its state for forensics. The VAC gives system operators time to replace the failed controller and prevents dangerous and costly damage to power systems. The VAC is compared against the SEL 3505-3 RTAC and shown to have the necessary features to act as a failover controller.

Johnson, Jordan↗
DOE OSTI2023

Final Report for ARPA-E LOCOMOTIVES Advanced Locomotive Technology and Rail Infrastructure Optimization System (ALTRIOS) Project

The Advanced Locomotive Technology and Rail Infrastructure Optimization System (ALTRIOS) is a unique, fully integrated, open-source software tool used to evaluate strategies for cost-effectively deploying advanced locomotive technologies and associated infrastructure. ALTRIOS simulates freight-demand-driven train scheduling, mainline meet-pass planning, locomotive dynamics, train dynamics, energy conversion efficiencies, and energy storage dynamics of line-haul train operations. Because new locomotives represent a significant long-term capital investment and new technologies must be thoroughly demonstrated before deployment, this tool provides guidance on the risk/reward trade-offs and operation integration of different technology rollout strategies. An open, integrated simulation tool is valuable for identifying future research needs and making decisions on technology development, routes, and train selection. This final report details the ALTRIOS software architecture, major modules and components, and data validation process. It demonstrates the software's utility through a 30-year rollout case study targeting high penetration of advanced powertrain technologies by 2050 for two BNSF Railway routes: loaded taconite ore trains from Hibbing, Minnesota, to Superior, Wisconsin, and mixed-freight trains from Superior to Minneapolis, Minnesota.

33 ADVANCED PROPULSION SYSTEMS↗
DOE OSTI2020

A Data Exchange Interface for a Standards Based Data Integration Platform

The modern electrical grid is a complex and a data rich system, requiring several sub-systems to provide the capability and support needed to perform functions such as distributed energy resource management, outage management, and fault location and isolation, to name a few. There is a need to develop software solutions and platforms that provide an integrated infrastructure to allow interoperability between these subsystems, while leveraging the abundant data available from today’s grid. In this paper, we present the development and deployment of an application service to integrate GridAPPS-D which is an open source, standards-based software platform with SurvalentONE, a commonly used DNP3 based ADMS platform that allows operation, monitoring, analysis, restoration, and optimization of network operations. We present details of the integration architecture, including its implementation, and provide results from functional testing of the architecture on a 13 bus IEEE system. The results validate that the integration is successful and is able to provide a two-way exchange of communication and translation between different communication protocols.

Singh, Alka↗
DOE OSTI2026

Throughput Estimation of Data Transport Networks From Digital Twin Measurements

Digital twins of networked infrastructures, known as Virtual Infrastructure Twins (VITs), are increasingly used for software development, pre-deployment testing, and design space exploration. While VITs avoid the costs and potential disruptions associated with experiments on operational networks, their throughput measurements are typically not sufficiently accurate for performance profiling of wide-area networks that they emulate. Here, machine learning (ML) methods are developed to transform these inaccurate VIT network throughput measurements to closely match in peak and overall profile of those from a physical testbed or production network. First, a micro kernel network reflecting a physical network is utilized to collect one-time measurements on a host to support this ML transformation. Then, a generic multi-modal ML method is developed to learn a map that transforms measurements from subsequent VITs on the same host to match past, current and follow-on testbed and cloud networks. ML generalization equations are derived to establish its correctness and probabilistically guarantee its generalization accuracy. Experimental results are presented for a variety of VIT hosts with target testbed and cloud networks; they include a case study of a four-site science ecosystem wherein inaccurate convex VIT measurement profiles are transformed into accurate concave profiles of target networks.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗
DOE OSTI2025

The ePIC Simulation Campaign Workflow on the Open Science Grid

The ePIC collaboration is realizing the first experiment of the future Electron-Ion Collider (EIC) at the Brookhaven National Laboratory that will allow for a precision study of the nucleons and the nucleus at the scale of sea quarks and gluons through the study of electron-proton/ion collisions. This paper will discuss the current workflow for running centralized simulation campaigns for ePIC on the Open Science Grid (OSG) infrastructure. This involves monthly releases of ePIC software and container deployments to CVMFS, generation of input datasets in HepMC format according to collaboration-defined policy, using Snakemake in CI/CD for validation and benchmarking, and submitting jobs to the OSG condor scheduler for opportunistic running on available resources. File transfers utilize XrootD, and Rucio is used for data management. The workflow is continuously refined to improve daily throughput (currently 50-100k core hours per day) and minimize job failures. Since May 2023, monthly simulation campaigns employing the workflow have cumulatively used over 20 million core hours on the OSG and produced over 350 TB of simulation data. The campaigns incorporate simulations for the broad science program of the EIC and are actively used for the detector and physics studies in preparation of the Technical Design Report (TDR).

73 NUCLEAR PHYSICS AND RADIATION PHYSICS↗
DOE OSTI2024

Enabling DER visibility using a distributed dissemination network

The electrical grid is currently undergoing a series of rapid transformational changes that have resulted in the introduction of new actors and operational schemes that have fragmented the data and control planes. To help address the issue, this paper describes the implementation of a sensor-oriented, distributed data dissemination network that seeks to eliminate data silos. The implementation is based on the DGSS architecture previously described in [1]. The developed product seeks to facilitate the seamless integration of multi-operator, multi-origin, multi-domain sensor data by using a distributed systems approach. The proposed solution decouples the sensor’s data streams from the application-specific infrastructure and migrates them into a software-defined databus that can be configured to suit the end application’s demands. To further validate DGSS capabilities, a DER oriented use case has been developed.

Sensor Dissemination Networks, Enhanced DER visibi↗
DOE OSTI2022

Caldera Infrastructure Charge Module (ICM)

Caldera ICM is part of Caldera software platform, a suite of collective, open-source tools that was developed to improve the state of the art in modeling the impacts of Electric Vehicle (EV) charging on the grid. The foundation of Caldera ICM is it’s first-of-its-kind library of high-fidelity charging models for a wide variety of vehicles, validated by test data under a range of operating conditions. The charging models are used to accurately model the EV charging on an electric vehicle supply equipment (EVSE) – also known as a charger. ICM uses as inputs, the EV characteristics such as battery size, battery chemistry (i.e. NMC, LTO), watt hour per mile, inverter efficiency and max charge rate; as well as EVSE characteristics such as max current and supply equipment type (i.e. L2 vs XFC). Using these inputs Caldera ICM creates an uncontrolled charging profile curve for each compatible EV-EVSE pair. These charge profiles can be used stand alone to estimate charge duration given start State Of Charge (SOC) and end SOC or charge energy size given start SOC and charge duration. In Caldera Grid, another tool in the Caldera software platform, these charge profiles are used to represent EV charging as a load on the grid using charge event data such as EV type, SE type, start SOC, final SOC, park start time and park end time. ICM currently supports energy shifting Smart Charge Management (SCM) strategies such as "Time Of Use (TOU) immediate”, “TOU random” and “random start” by delaying the charge to start at a preferable time with respect to the strategy and, one voltage support SCM strategy named autonomous voltage control strategy by providing reactive power back to the electric grid.

Sundarrajan, ManojKumar Cebol↗
DOE OSTI2021

Safety Applications Project FY20-21 Highlights, FY2022 Goals [Slides]

Collaborations leverage the investment and expertise of others. Code capabilities determine the questions that can be addressed using SAP tools. Infrastructure acts as a force multiplier for software developer skills. Improved code performance allows simulations to finish faster or with greater fidelity. Code performance has dramatically improved over the past ~4 years.

42 ENGINEERING↗
DOE OSTI2020

LDM-148: Rubin Observatory Data Management System Design

The Rubin Observatory LSST Data Management System (DMS) is a set of services employing a variety of software components running on computational and networking infrastructure that combine to deliver science data products to the observatory's users and support observatory operations. This document describes the components, their service instances, and their deployment environments as well as the interfaces among them, the rest of the LSST system, and the outside world.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗
DOE OSTI2025

Automated Inventory Solutions in End-User IT Support

Managing IT equipment by hand is prone to errors and delays, severely impacting operational continuity and productivity. Manual inventory systems often result in time delays, inconsistent record-keeping, equipment shortages, and increased workloads for IT staff. At Savannah River National Laboratory (SRNL), my internship focused on creating an automated inventory management solution using Microsoft Power Automate and SharePoint Lists. This solution seamlessly integrates with the existing Microsoft 365 infrastructure, thus eliminating the need for additional software purchases or dedicated server space. By providing real-time updates and reducing manual data entry, the new system ensures a more reliable and maintainable approach to IT asset management.

Information Technology↗