Aggregating and Disaggregating Flexibility Objects

Flexibility objects, objects with flexibilities in time and amount dimensions (e.g., energy or product amount), occur in many scienti c and commercial domains. Managing such objects with existing DBMSs is infeasible due to the complexity, data volume, and complex functionality needed, so a new kind of flexibility database is needed. This paper is the fi rst to consider flexibility databases. It formally defi nes the concept of flexibility objects (flex-objects), and provide a novel and efficient solution for aggregating and disaggregating flex-objects. This is important for a range of applications, including smart grid energy management. The paper considers the grouping of flex-objects, alternatives for computing aggregates, the disaggregation process, their associated requirements, as well as efficient incremental computation. Extensive experiments based on data from a real-world energy domain project show that the proposed solution provides good performance while still satisfying the strict requirements.

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Laurynas Šikšnys, Mohamed E. Khalefa, and Torben Bach Pedersen: Aggregating and Disaggregating Flexibility Objects; In: Proceedings of the 24th Scientific and Statistical Database Management Conference (SSDBM 2012, Chania, Crete, Greece), 2012.