Our Commitments

In 2015, two of our founders—Jorn Baayen and Tjerk Vreeken—began developing RTC-Tools (v2) at Deltares, a leading Dutch research institute for water and subsurface. What started as a tool for real-time control and optimization of water systems has evolved into a powerful open-source optimization platform used globally across water and energy sectors.

RTC-Tools combines the expressiveness of the Modelica modelling language with state-of-the-art numerical optimization techniques, enabling complex scheduling and energy management across diverse applications. The platform has been proven in some of the world's most challenging water management systems and is now powering advanced energy storage optimization.

A key strength of RTC-Tools is its support for stochastic optimization through ensemble-based approaches. Energy markets are inherently uncertain—prices fluctuate, weather affects renewable generation, and grid conditions change continuously. Rather than optimizing for a single forecast, ensemble optimization finds strategies that perform well across multiple plausible futures. This is essential for energy trading, where today's decisions lock in tomorrow's opportunities and traders must balance expected returns against downside risk.

As of 2025, RTC-Tools is a Technical Project of LF Energy, an open source foundation within the Linux Foundation that supports the energy sector's transition to renewables through open-source software development and adoption.

This adoption marks LF Energy's expansion beyond traditional grid operations into trading technology, reflecting the growing convergence of grid management and market optimization. We're proud to contribute to this ecosystem and collaborate with the global LF Energy community.