Nowadays, Renewable Energy Sources (RES) are attracting more and more interest. Thus, many countries aim to increase the share of green energy and have to face with several challenges (e.g., balancing, storage, pricing). In this paper, we address the balancing challenge and present the MIRABEL project which aims to prototype an Energy Data Management System (EDMS) which takes benefit of flexibilities to efficiently balance energy demand and supply. The EDMS consists of millions of heterogeneous nodes that each incorporates advanced components (e.g., aggregation, forecasting, scheduling, negotiation). We describe each of these components and their interaction. Preliminary experimental results confirm the feasibility of our EDMS.

Abstract.A location-based service called friend-locator notifies a user if the user is geographically close to any of the user's friends. Services of this kind are getting increasingly popular due to the penetration of GPS in mobile phones, but existing commercial friend-locator services require users to trade their location privacy for quality of service, limiting the attractiveness of the services. The challenge is to develop a communication-efficient solution such that (i) it detects proximity between a user and the user's friends, (ii) any other party is not allowed to infer the location of the user, and (iii) users have flexible choices of their proximity detection distances. To address this challenge, we develop a client-server solution for proximity detection based on an encrypted, grid-based mapping of locations. Experimental results show that our solution is indeed efficient and scalable to a large number of users.

In many scientific and commercial domains we encounter flexibility objects, i.e., objects with explicit flexibilities in a time and an amount dimension (e.g., energy or product amount). Applications of flexibility objects require novel and efficient techniques capable of handling large amounts of such objects while preserving flexibility. Hence, this paper formally defines the concept of flexibility objects (flex-objects) and provides a novel and efficient solution for aggregating and disaggregating flex-objects. Out of the broad range of possible applications, this paper will focus on smart grid energy data management and discuss strategies for aggregation and disaggregation of flex-objects while retaining flexibility. This paper further extends these approaches beyond flex-objects originating from energy consumption by additionally considering flex-objects originating from energy production and aiming at energy balancing during aggregation. In more detail, this paper considers the complete life cycle of flex-objects: aggregation, disaggregation, associated requirements, efficient incremental computation, and balance aggregation techniques. Extensive experiments based on real-world data from the energy domain show that the proposed solutions provide good performance while satisfying the strict requirements.

Accelerated local deployments of renewable energy sources and energy storage units, as well as increased overall flexibility in local demand and supply through active user involvement and smart energy solutions, open up new opportunities (e.g., self-sufficiency and CO 2 neutrality through local renewables) and yet pose new challenges (e.g., how to maintain the security of supply and get the best yield) to market players in the lower parts of the energy system (including prosumers, energy communities, aggregators, and distribution system operators (DSOs)). One way to cope with the challenges requires "logical" reorganization of the energy system bottom-up as a number of nested (maximally) self-sufficient and interacting cells with their own local (i.e. within a cell) energy management and trading capabilities. This change necessitates effective IT-based solutions. Towards this goal, we propose a unified Flexibility Modeling, Management, and Trading System (FMTS) that generalizes flexibility modeling, management, and intra-cell trading in such cellular energy systems. Our system offers different flexibility provisioning options (Machine Learning based, and Model Predictive Control based), activation mechanisms (indirect and direct device-control), and trading schemes (e.g. flexibility contracts, market-based trading) and suits different cellular system use-cases. In this paper, we introduce the FMTS, overview its core functionality and components, and explain how it practically manages, prices, and trades flexibility from a diverse variety of loads. We then introduce the real-world FMTS instances developed in the GOFLEX project 1 and present experimental results that demonstrate significantly increased flexibility capacities, user gains, and balance between demand and supply when an FMTS instance is used in the simulated cellular energy system setting.

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The recent spread of distributed renewable energy sources and smart IoT devices offer exciting new possibilities for the use of energy flexibility, opening a new era of the socalled bottom-up or cellular energy systems. In order to harness the full potential of flexibility, flexibility has to be modeled and represented in a manner that can be efficiently managed, manipulated, and traded on a market. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive overview of the FlexOffer concept, which offers an effective way of modeling and managing energy demand and supply flexibilities from a wide range of flexible resources and their aggregates. First, we define the basic concept and present the different phases of the FlexOffer life-cycle. Then, we discuss more advanced internal FlexOffer constraints as well as algorithms for FlexOffer generation, aggregation, disaggregation, and pricing that can significantly reduce energy management and trading complexities and increase overall efficiency. Finally, we present a general decentralized system architecture for trading flexibility (FlexOffers) in existing and new markets. Our experimental results show that (1) FlexOffers can be extracted with up to 98% accuracy, (2) aggregation and disaggregation can scale to 1000K FlexOffers and more, and (3) flexibility can be traded in the NordPool flexi order market while providing up to 89.9% (of optimal) reduction in the energy cost.

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This paper provides a survey of the stateof-the-art and future directions of one of the most important emerging technologies within Business Analytics (BA), namely Prescriptive Analytics (PSA). BA focuses on data-driven decision making and consists of three phases: Descriptive, Predictive, and Prescriptive Analytics. While Descriptive and Predictive Analytics allow us to analyze past and predict future events, respectively, these activities do not provide any direct support for decision making. Here, PSA fills the gap between data and decisions. We have observed an increasing interest for in-DBMS PSA systems in both research and industry. Thus, this paper aims to provide a foundation for PSA as a separate field of study. To do this, we first describe the different phases of BA. We then survey classical analytics systems and identify their main limitations for supporting PSA, based on which we introduce the criteria and methodology used in our analysis. We next survey, categorize, and discuss the state-of-the-art within emerging, so-called PSA + , systems, followed by a presentation of the main challenges and opportunities for next generation PSA systems. Finally, the main findings are discussed and directions for future research are outlined.