Forecasting and Optimization as a Service for Energy Management Applications with the Energy Service Generics Framework

Energy management, in sense of computing optimized operation schedules for devices, will likely play a vital role in future carbon neutral energy systems, as it allows unlocking energy efficiency and flexibility potentials. However, energy management systems need to be applied at large scales to realize the desired effect, which clearly requires minimization of costs for setup and operation of the individual applications. In order to push the latter forward, we promote an approach to split the complex optimization algorithms employed by energy management systems into standardized components, which can be provided as a service with marginal costs at scale. In this work we contribute a practical example how such services can be implemented utilizing the Energy Service Generics framework, a software explicitly designed to allow scientists and practitioners to derive fully functional web services from forecasting or optimization algorithms. To this end the implementation of typical components of forecasting or optimization services for energy management applications is discussed based on functional source code listings of a simple photovoltaic (PV) power generation forecast service.