Real-Time Business Intelligence in the MIRABEL Smart Grid System

The so-called smart grid is emerging in the energy domain as a solution to provide a stable, efficient and sustainable energy supply accommodating ever growing amounts of renewable energy like wind and solar in the energy production. Smart grid systems are highly distributed, manage large amounts of energy related data, and must be able to react rapidly (but intelligently) when conditions change, leading to substantial real-time business intelligence challenges. This paper discusses these challenges and presents data management solutions in the European smart grid project MIRABEL. These solutions include real-time time series forecasting, real-time aggregation of the flexibilities in energy supply and demand, managing subscriptions for forecasted and flexibility data, efficient storage of time series and flexibilities, and real-time analytical query processing spanning past and future (forecasted) data. Experimental studies show that the proposed solutions support important real-time business intelligence tasks in a smart grid system.