Developing a Domain-Specific Language for Scheduling in the European Energy Sector

European electricity companies trade electric power across country and market boundaries. So called schedules are data sets that define the terms and conditions of such power trades. Different proprietary or standardized formats for schedules exist. However, due to a wide variety of different trading partners and power markets, a number of problems arise which complicate the standardized exchange of schedules. In this paper, we discuss a project that we conducted to develop a domain-specific language (DSL) for scheduling in a large Austrian electricity company running more than 140 power plants. The DSL is written in Ruby and provides a standardized programming model for specifying schedules, reduces code redundancy, and enables domain experts (“schedulers”) to set up and to change market definitions autonomously.