A Review on Time Series Aggregation Methods for Energy System Models

Due to the high degree of intermittency of renewable energy sources (RES) and the growing interdependences amongst formerly separated energy pathways, the modeling of adequate energy systems is crucial to evaluate existing energy systems and to forecast viable future ones. However, this corresponds to the rising complexity of energy system models (ESMs) and often results in computationally intractable programs. To overcome this problem, time series aggregation (TSA) is frequently used to reduce ESM complexity. As these methods aim at the reduction of input data and preserving the main information about the time series, but are not based on mathematically equivalent transformations, the performance of each method depends on the justifiability of its assumptions. This review systematically categorizes the TSA methods applied in 130 different publications to highlight the underlying assumptions and to evaluate the impact of these on the respective case studies. Moreover, the review analyzes current trends in TSA and formulates subjects for future research. This analysis reveals that the future of TSA is clearly feature-based including clustering and other machine learning techniques which are capable of dealing with the growing amount of input data for ESMs. Further, a growing number of publications focus on bounding the TSA induced error of the ESM optimization result. Thus, this study can be used as both an introduction to the topic and for revealing remaining research gaps.