Balancing Flexible Production and Consumption of Energy using Resource Timed Automata

We address the problem of modeling and analyzing the flexible behavior of Prosumer systems for the purpose of balancing production and consumption of energy in, for example, an energy grid. We introduce the notion of Resource Timed Automata (RTA) and show how prosumers can be modeled using these automata. Furthermore, we show that aggeregation of prosumers in a smart electricity grid can be modeled as a special kind of parallel composition of such automata, and the balancing problem can be formalized as reachability problems on an observer automaton. Finally, we illustrate how these reachability problems can be solved using established methods from model checking, and discuss why we suspect these methods will scale well in practice for this type of problem.