The BelVis⁺ Scheduling Cockpit in a fact check.

The completely redesigned BelVis⁺ PFM comes with a standalone timetable cockpit. Steffen Homann (Head of Trade) and Maik Köppen (Head of Bid Management) at KISTERS explain its strengths and how it benefits users in their day-to-day business in an interview.

What is the Scheduling Cockpit in BelVis⁺ PFM and what role does it play in day-to-day business?

Maik Köppen: The Scheduling Cockpit is the central tool for all operational tasks in timetable and nomination management. Its basic idea is to bring together all tasks, data flows and market notifications in a single interface and radically reduce the complexity of everyday scheduling.

We provide an integrated view of nominations, schedules, feedback, market partners, deadlines and deviations. This clear, centralised view – combined with a modern user interface and a high degree of automation – significantly reduces manual tasks and creates a level of transparency that is crucial in the energy market, especially in intraday trading or with complex balancing group structures.

Steffen Homann: It must be said quite clearly: schedule management is not a glamorous process – it is a ‘mandatory process’ that does not earn any money, but can cost a lot if it goes wrong. Errors can lead to balancing energy costs or contract violations, and in any case require work and coordination. That is why the entire process must be as robust, automated and resilient as possible.

For us, it was crucial to create a solution that is not only technically modern, but above all works in the everyday life of the user — in the stress of the intraday, at the weekend, on call, under time pressure. This is exactly what our web-based cockpit does.

How mature is the system today?

Homann: The Scheduling Cockpit is in daily productive use at nearly 100 customers. These customers represent a wide variety of roles: energy trading companies, municipal utilities, international suppliers, balancing group managers, direct marketers, large-scale industry and redispatch players. This diversity ensures a very broad spectrum of real-world use cases and specialised processes.

Through this intensive practical use, we have been able to make the system extremely robust over the past few years. Many optimisations originate directly from our customers’ production scenarios — in other words, from real problems, bottlenecks or processes.

What are the key advantages of the Scheduling Cockpit in everyday use?

Köppen: The first major advantage is consistent automation. The Cockpit takes care of the time-controlled creation of timetables and nominations, automates continuous dispatch, processes feedback and detects deviations. Added to this is the clear, modern user interface. With dashboards, status overviews and clearly visualised structures, users immediately understand what the status quo is, what activities are pending and where problems have arisen.

Homann: Another significant advantage is the focus on process reliability. The Cockpit prevents problems from arising that would later have to be paid for dearly. It automatically monitors deadlines, detects implausible values, performs validations and issues warnings or escalations at the right moment.

It also ensures that the schedule management process, which does not actually add any value, takes up as little working time as possible. Fewer manual interventions mean more capacity for trading, portfolio optimisation and strategic issues.

How powerful is the Scheduling Cockpit?

Köppen: Performance was a key development goal from the outset. Planning and nomination processes have to be fast – especially in intraday trading, where every second counts. The cockpit calculates a complete schedule for a balancing group in less than three seconds, including validation, structuring and automatic balancing group balancing.

Homann: The key point is that the calculation is fully parallelised. This means that even 100 timetables can be generated and sent within less than a minute. Performance is a real competitive advantage, especially in intraday trading. If you can trade until the last minute, you have a better chance than companies that have to start generating timetables five minutes before gate closure.

What about reliability and update stability?

Köppen: BelVis⁺ PFM is based on a Kubernetes-supported microservice architecture that ensures that individual components can be scaled, monitored and restored independently of each other. If one node fails, another automatically takes over. If a single service malfunctions, it is automatically restarted in the background without the user noticing. These self-healing mechanisms are a major difference in the market compared to classic monolithic systems.

Homann: Updates are also extremely fast. Since only the affected service is updated, the actual downtime is often less than 10 seconds. For users, it feels almost like ‘zero downtime’.

This means no night-time maintenance windows, no interruptions to the scheduling process, and no risk of failure.

Which markets and processes does the Scheduling Cockpit cover?

Köppen: The cockpit covers almost all relevant European markets: in the gas sector, these are THE and TTF; in the electricity sector, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Belgium, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and France. In addition, there are special processes such as ERRP, GLDPM, storage and transport nominations, and counterparty nominations.

The cockpit thus supports the entire range of modern scheduling requirements.

Homann: Another advantage is its broad format support: ESS, CIM, Edigas/XML, GLDPM, ELIA-XML, DELFOR and many more. We cover virtually everything that is relevant in Western Europe — and in a structure that can be quickly expanded when new requirements arise.

How does the cockpit support error analysis and monitoring?

Köppen: The cockpit performs a rule-based analysis of all feedback and automatically detects where deviations, inconsistent time series or missing values occur. In addition, the Scheduling Cockpit offers a comprehensive early warning system. This is used to monitor open positions, perform consistency and syntax checks, and monitor configurable thresholds for individual timetable time series (keyword: declaration lists).

In the event of errors, the system proactively reports them via the integrated alarm system or automatically via e-mail notification.

What distinguishes BelVis⁺ PFM from other systems in terms of format adjustments?

Homann: This topic is one of our most important unique selling points. The market is not standardised. Yes, there are specifications — but practically every market partner interprets them slightly differently. While other systems only allow such adjustments to be made by the manufacturer or IT department, users can adjust the format structures themselves in the Scheduling Cockpit and add or remove XML nodes, adjust EDIFACT segments or add new fields. This allows you to create complete format variants without programming, without code, without release. This means full flexibility directly for the user — saving many customers days or even weeks of waiting time.

What specific advantages does this offer in day-to-day operations?

Köppen: The cockpit relieves users of a large part of their operational workload. Many processes run automatically in the background. This creates security and greatly reduces the burden on teams — especially in times of high market complexity.

Homann: Many customers report that they have been able to reduce their daily scheduling workload by up to 50% — while simultaneously improving process quality. This is an enormous productivity gain and one of the main reasons why the Scheduling Cockpit is so widely accepted by teams.