GridTool: An open-source tool to convert electricity grid data

This paper introduces the open-source GridTool software. It is an easy-to-use tool to convert and simplify electricity grid data from the OpenStreetMap-project (OSM) for the use in power simulation models. The main advantages of the newly developed tool are its flexibility, customizability and its heuristic approach for identifying grid nodes. Instead of the lengthy and manual process of converting and implementing electricity grid data by hand, the GridTool shortens that task to seconds. During this process the OSM data gets reduced to essential elements needed in power simulation models. To our knowledge, there is no other open-source tool, that does this task out-of-the-box, is as easy-to-use, only requires a single program (MATLAB), and uses a heuristic approach.