Renewable Energy Forecasting (ReEF)
About
Renewable sources of energy display distinct characteristics, like the fluctuation of energy production and a decentralized regional output. Thus, they differ decisively from conventional sources of energy. Integrating the increasing share of solar energy and wind power into the overall energy production is a challenging task for all partners involved. The forecast of the amount of produced energy is a crucial aspect, as this is the basic information needed for regulating the balance between energy supply and demand.
Having this in mind, the aim of the project ReEF is to evaluate the existing multitude of forecasting methods. Furthermore, ReEF is striving for the development of optimization methods. The project focusses on identifying an optimum aggregation point for forecasts by using hierarchical clustering algorithms including the use of appropriate similarity measures for energy time series and making maximum use of additional context information. Therefore, a suitable benchmarking method is designed and developed for these forecasts. This framework will give technical support when deciding for an ideal model or a combination of models and will simplify decision-making. By the integration of necessary data pre- and post-processing measures this process will be mainly automatized and can be executed by a wide range of users.
Online Access
The demom version of the ECAST benchmark framework can be accessed here. You can either register for your free personal account or use the public demo user (login/pwd demo/demo) to explore the world of online forecasting.
Demonstrator
History & Milestones
2013: Start of development. First prototype version of ECAST was implemented by the student team Lucas Brünings and Willy Zobel. The focus lies on the integration of publicly available forecasting libraries OpenForcast and Mirabel together with an commercial product for benchmarking purposes. An open R* interface was added by Lars Kegel.
2014: The ECAST idea is presented by Robert Ulbricht at an EDBT conference workshop. Furthermore, an web-Interface is added by Lucas Brünings. The benchmark framework prototype is now available as a stand-alone online service.
2015: ECAST prototype was transformed to a stable demo version by the student team Johannes Wilke, Dennis Veit, Sebastian Freund, and Frederick Huschebeck. Some core modules are rebuilt from scratch, web techology is changed to offer a more user friendly and flexible interface.
2016: ECAST demonstration is successfully presented by Wolfgang Lehner at SIGMOD conference in San Francisco.
2017: An ECAST-branch designed by Lars Kegel is used as the central benchmark service in the GOFLEX project. Additional external data sources are integrated exlusively for that purpose. Data exchange between the participants is highly automated.
2018: A new core module for forecast combination tasks is added. The conceptual analysis and development were conducted by the student team Dustin Laudahn, Thomas Olszewski, Amir Rahimi, Nick Scheider, and Alexander Volkmann.
2019: The evaluation module is extended to cover a wider branch of state-of-the-art performance evaluation measures and an additional interface for tailor-made measures. Additionally, ECAST now uses intelligent parallelization techniques in order to enhance servic quality and reduce respone times for users. (Work in progress)
Acknowledgment
This research project is funded by the European Regional Development Fund (EFRE) and the Free State of Saxony under the grant agreement number 100269304 and co-financed by Robotron Datenbank-Software GmbH.
Related Publications
@article{,
author = {Robert Ulbricht and Bijay Neupane and Martin Hahmann and Wolfgang Lehner},
title = {A value-based evaluation methodology for renewable energy supply prediction},
booktitle = {ITISE 2018 International Conference on Time Series and Forecasting: Proceedings of Papers, 1589-1600, Granada, Spain.},
year = {2018},
month = {1},
location = {Granada, Spain}
}@article{,
author = {Robert Ulbricht and Hilko Donker and Claudio Hartmann and Martin Hahmann and Wolfgang Lehner},
title = {Challenges for Context-Driven Time Series Forecasting},
journal = {J. Data and Information Quality},
volume = {7},
year = {2016},
url = {http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2896822}
}@article{,
author = {Robert Ulbricht and Claudio Hartmann and Martin Hahmann and Hilko Donker and Wolfgang Lehner},
title = {Web-based Benchmarks for Forecasting Systems: The ECAST Platform},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2016 International Conference on Management of Data, SIGMOD Conference 2016, San Francisco, CA, USA, June 26 - July 01, 2016},
year = {2016},
isbn = {978-1-4503-3531-7},
pages = {2169--2172},
url = {http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2882903.2899399},
publisher = {\"{o}zcan, Fatma; Koutrika, Georgia \& Madden, Sam}
}Dealing with Uncertainty: An Empirical Study on the Relevance of Renewable Energy Forecasting Methods.
@article{,
author = {Robert Ulbricht and Anna Tho\ss and Gunter Gr\"{a}fe and Hilko Donker and Wolfgang Lehner},
title = {Dealing with Uncertainty: An Empirical Study on the Relevance of Renewable Energy Forecasting Methods},
booktitle = {Data Analytics for Renewable Energy Integration - 4th ECML PKDD Workshop, DARE 2016, Riva del Garda, Italy, September 23, 2016, Revised Selected Papers},
series = {Lecture Notes in Computer Science},
volume = {10097},
year = {2016},
isbn = {978-3-319-50946-4},
pages = {54--66},
url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-50947-1_6},
publisher = {Woon, Wei Lee; Aung, Zeyar; Kramer, Oliver \& Madnick, Stuart E.}
}@article{,
author = {Robert Ulbricht and Martin Hahmann and Hilko Donker and Wolfgang Lehner},
title = {Systematical Evaluation of Solar Energy Supply Forecasts},
booktitle = {Data Analytics for Renewable Energy Integration - Second ECML PKDD Workshop, DARE 2014, Nancy, France, September 19, 2014, Revised Selected Papers},
series = {Lecture Notes in Computer Science},
volume = {8817},
year = {2014},
isbn = {978-3-319-13289-1},
pages = {108--121},
url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-13290-7_9},
publisher = {Woon, Wei Lee; Aung, Zeyar \& Madnick, Stuart E.}
}@article{,
author = {Robert Ulbricht and Ulrike Fischer and Lars Kegel and Dirk Habich and Hilko Donker and Wolfgang Lehner},
title = {ECAST: A Benchmark Framework for Renewable Energy Forecasting Systems},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the Workshops of the EDBT/ICDT 2014 Joint Conference (EDBT/ICDT 2014), Athens, Greece, March 28, 2014.},
series = {CEUR Workshop Proceedings},
volume = {1133},
year = {2014},
pages = {148--155},
url = {http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1133/paper-23.pdf},
publisher = {Candan, K. Selçcuk; Amer-Yahia, Sihem; Schweikardt, Nicole; Christophides, Vassilis \& Leroy, Vincent}
}@article{,
author = {Robert Ulbricht and Ulrike Fischer and Wolfgang Lehner and Hilko Donker},
title = {Rethinking Energy Data Management: Trends and Challenges in Today\&\#8217;s Transforming Markets},
booktitle = {Datenbanksysteme f\"{u}r Business, Technologie und Web (BTW), 15. Fachtagung des GI-Fachbereichs Datenbanken und Informationssysteme"' (DBIS)},
volume = {214},
year = {2013},
isbn = {978-3-88579-608-4},
pages = {421--440},
url = {http://www.btw-2013.de/proceedings/Rethinking\%20Energy\%20Data\%20Management\%20Trends\%20and\%20Challenges\%20in\%20Todays\%20Transforming\%20Markets.pdf}
}@article{,
author = {Wolfgang Lehner and Ulrike Fischer and Robert Ulbricht},
title = {Optimized renewable energy forecasting in local distribution networks},
booktitle = {Joint 2013 EDBT/ICDT Conferences, EDBT/ICDT '13, Genoa, Italy, March 22, 2013, Workshop Proceedings},
year = {2013},
isbn = {978-1-4503-1599-9},
pages = {262--266},
url = {http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2457317.2457360},
publisher = {Guerrini, Giovanna}
}Methodische Unterstützung der Modellauswahl für Energieprognosen
Stefan Hinkel April 15th, 2016 until December 20th, 2016
Diplom ThesisSupervision: Robert Ulbricht, Wolfgang Lehner
Heuristische Modellempfehlung zur Prognose von Energiezeitreihen mit externen Einflüssen
Tom Fels July 1st, 2017 until December 14th, 2017
Master ThesisSupervision: Robert Ulbricht, Wolfgang Lehner
Systematic Analysis of Impact of Aggregation on Time Series Forecasting
Sachin Vittal January 1st, 2014 until June 3rd, 2015
Master ThesisSupervision: Robert Ulbricht, Claudio Hartmann, Wolfgang Lehner
Merkmalsauswahl zur Optimierung von Prognoseprozessen
Tom Fels July 1st, 2015 until September 23rd, 2015
Bachelor ThesisSupervision: Robert Ulbricht, Claudio Hartmann, Wolfgang Lehner