A Planning Simulation Tool for Energy Harvesting Applications

Energy harvesting (EH) is a key enabling technology for the autonomous operation of smart devices. However, designing a system based on energy harvesting is much more difficult than designing battery-powered systems. The system has to weigh the balance between harvested energy and consumed energy, while taking into account various uncertainties in the actual environment. Achieving this requirement necessitates the precise refinement and integration of hardware modules and software structures; however, it remains difficult for non-experts to design such a system from scratch. In this paper, we propose PLEH, a PLanning simulation tool for Energy Harvesting applications, which is expected to facilitate determining the most relevant hardware modules and the software structure. PLEH estimates the variation in the energy consumption over time based on our abstract EH application model. We demonstrate three usage scenarios that are common to novice developers of EH applications.