Aggregating and Disaggregating Flexibility Objects

Flexibility objects, objects with flexibilities in time and amount dimensions (e.g., energy or product amount), occur in many scientific 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 first to consider flexibility databases. It formally defines 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.