Paper No 043 – Application of the DevOps methodology on heat pump controllers – 13th IEA Heat Pump Conference, Jeju, Korea
In the work, we show how the DevOps methodology supports the development of heat pump (HP) systems. Modern software development and operation control uses the DevOps method to roll out quickly new software, while keeping an overview of the effects and changes. These features are also applicable for HP controller software. Since rolling out new software to customers is a risky task, the deployment stage of the DevOps cycle runs additional hardware-in-the-loop (HiL) experiments first. If the result is sufficient, the next stage is carried out. Evidently, this requires a high level of automation. On the software side, we use the GitLab CI/CD infrastructure to validate software under static and dynamic measures. Once the HP software is ready to run on a real refrigerant circuit, it is automatically deployed to one. The HP within the HiL setup continues to run with the new software. Since the HiL experiments perform in real time, a continuous observation is necessary to abort the experiment once it fails. Thus, the HiL test bench requires a complex data handling and processing infrastructure.