As society's demand for sustainable energy continues to grow, the design of energy systems is becoming more complex and diverse. The introduction and development of the concurrent design (co-design) concepts allow for easy assessment of the impact and propagation of design decisions made on subsystems across the entire system. Co-design has become increasingly valuable in energy system design as a design methodology that integrates different design target for the overall system design into same framework e.g., simultaneous optimizing control law and physical system dimensions. Generally speaking, control optimization methods and system-level design-optimization have also become key factors in improving the efficiency and performance of energy systems.

In this Bachelor’s thesis, first a discussion about the current situation of energy systems design complexity is given and then the development of concurrent design approaches is focused. Here a variety of case studies of systems in different energy sectors where co-design is applied are considered to analyse the practical application of concurrent design, control and optimization methods, and to illustrate the importance and impact of these methods in the design of energy systems. This study seeks to provide a comprehensive understanding and application of the co-design methodology for energy system design, by focusing on current literature and examples presented in them.