Multi-Layered Clustering for Power Consumption Profiling in Smart Grids

Open access publicationSmart Grids (SGs) have many advantages over traditional power grids as they enhance the way electricity is generated, distributed, and consumed by adopting advanced sensing, communication and control functionalities that depend on power consumption profiles of consumers. Clustering algorithms (e.g., centralized clustering) are used for profiling individual’s power consumption. Due to the distributed nature and ever growing size of SGs, it is predicted that massive amounts of data will be created. However, conventional clustering algorithms neither efficient enough nor scalable enough to deal with such amount of data. In addition, the cost for transferring and analyzing large amounts of data is expensive high both computationally and communicationally. This paper thus proposes a power consumption profiling model based on two levels of clustering. At the first level, local power consumption profiles are derived, which are then used by the second level in order to create a global power consumption profile. The followed approach reduces the communication and computation complexity of the proposed two level model and improves the privacy of consumers. We point out that having good knowledge of the local power profiles leads to more effective prediction model and cost-effective power pricing scheme, especially in a heterogeneous grid topology. In addition, the correlations between the local and global profiles can be used to localize/identify power consumption outliers. Simulation results illustrate that the proposed model is effective in reducing the computational complexity without much affecting its accuracy. The reduction in computational complexity is about 52% and the reduction in the communicational complexity is about 95% when compared to the centralized clustering approach

Energy load forecast in smart buildings with deep learning techniques

Predicting energy load is a growing problem these days. The need to study in advance how electricity consumption will behave is key to resource management. Especially interesting is the case of the so-called Smart Buildings, buildings born from the trend towards sustainable development and consumption which is increasingly in vogue, becoming mandatory by law in many countries. One type of model that constitutes an important part of the state of the art are the models based on Deep Learning. These models represented great advances in Artificial Intelligence recently, since although they were born in the 20th century, it has not been until 10 years ago that they have re-emerged thanks to the computational advances that allow them to be trained by the general public. In this Final Degree Project, advanced Deep Learning techniques applied to the problem of load prediction in Smart Buildings are presented, mainly basing the development on the data from the Alice Perry building of the National University of Ireland Galway, in collaboration with the Informatics Research Unit for Sustainable Engineering of the same university. The datasets used were obtained from the time series of aggregated electricity consumption of the air handling units (AHUs) in the Alice Perry building. Along with this information, historical weather data were also collected from the weather station in the same building in order to study if these climatic variables help to a better prediction in the models. Time series prediction on this energy load data will be made in two different ways with hourly granularity: one-step prediction in which studying the previous observations an estimate of the value of the load in the next hour is obtained and sequence prediction, in which we will try to predict the behaviour of the series in the next hours from the previous values.La predicción de carga energética es un problema al alza actualmente. La necesidad de estudiar con antelación cómo se va a comportar el consumo eléctrico es clave para la gestión de recursos. Especialmente interesante es el caso de los llamados Smart Buildings, edificios nacidos por la tendencia hacia un desarrollo y consumo sostenible el cual cada vez está más en boga, llegando a ser obligatorio por ley en muchos países. Un tipo de modelos que constituyen una parte importante del estado del arte son los modelos basados en Deep Learning. Estos modelos supusieron grandes avances en la Inteligencia Artificial recientemente, ya que aunque nacidos en el Siglo XX, no ha sido hasta escasos 10 años cuando han resurgido gracias a los avances computacionales que permiten entrenarlos por el público general. En este trabajo de fin de grado se presentan técnicas avanzadas de Deep Learning aplicadas al problema de la predicción de carga en Smart Buildings, principalmente basando el desarrollo en los datos del edificio Alice Perry de la National University of Ireland Galway, en colaboración con el grupo Informatics Research Unit for Sustainable Engineering de la misma universidad. Los conjuntos de datos utilizados se obtuvieron datos sobre la serie temporal de consumo eléctrico agregado de los aires acondicionados en el edificio Alice Perry. Junto a esta información, se recopilaron también datos meteorológicos históricos de la estación meteorológica en el mismo edificio con el objetivo de estudiar si estas variables climáticas ayudan a una mejor predicción en los modelos. La predicción de series temporales sobre estos datos de carga energética se realizará en dos modos con granularidad horaria: La predicción a un paso en la que estudiando las observaciones anteriores se obtiene una estimación del valor de la carga en la próxima hora y predicción de secuencias, en la que se intentará predecir el comportamiento de la serie en las próximas horas a partir de los valores anteriores.Grado en Ingeniería Informátic

A systematic literature review on the use of artificial intelligence in energy self-management in smart buildings

Buildings are one of the main consumers of energy in cities, which is why a lot of research has been generated around this problem. Especially, the buildings energy management systems must improve in the next years. Artificial intelligence techniques are playing and will play a fundamental role in these improvements. This work presents a systematic review of the literature on researches that have been done in recent years to improve energy management systems for smart building using artificial intelligence techniques. An originality of the work is that they are grouped according to the concept of "Autonomous Cycles of Data Analysis Tasks", which defines that an autonomous management system requires specialized tasks, such as monitoring, analysis, and decision-making tasks for reaching objectives in the environment, like improve the energy efficiency. This organization of the work allows us to establish not only the positioning of the researches, but also, the visualization of the current challenges and opportunities in each domain. We have identified that many types of researches are in the domain of decision-making (a large majority on optimization and control tasks), and defined potential projects related to the development of autonomous cycles of data analysis tasks, feature engineering, or multi-agent systems, among others.European Commissio

Time-Pattern Profiling from Smart Meter Data to Detect Outliers in Energy Consumption

Smart meters have become a core part of the Internet of Things, and its sensory network is increasing globally. For example, in the UK there are over 15 million smart meters operating across homes and businesses. One of the main advantages of the smart meter installation is the link to a reduction in carbon emissions. Research shows that, when provided with accurate and real-time energy usage readings, consumers are more likely to turn off unneeded appliances and change other behavioural patterns around the home (e.g., lighting, thermostat adjustments). In addition, the smart meter rollout results in a lessening in the number of vehicle callouts for the collection of consumption readings from analogue meters and a general promotion of renewable sources of energy supply. Capturing and mining the data from this fully maintained (and highly accurate) sensing network, provides a wealth of information for utility companies and data scientists to promote applications that can further support a reduction in energy usage. This research focuses on modelling trends in domestic energy consumption using density-based classifiers. The technique estimates the volume of outliers (e.g., high periods of anomalous energy consumption) within a social class grouping. To achieve this, Density-Based Spatial Clustering of Applications with Noise (DBSCAN), Ordering Points to Identify the Clustering Structure (OPTICS) and Local Outlier Factor (LOF) demonstrate the detection of unusual energy consumption within naturally occurring groups with similar characteristics. Using DBSCAN and OPTICS, 53 and 208 outliers were detected respectively; with 218 using LOF, on a dataset comprised of 1,058,534 readings from 1026 homes

Integrity and Privacy Protection for Cyber-physical Systems (CPS)

The present-day interoperable and interconnected cyber-physical systems (CPS) provides significant value in our daily lives with the incorporation of advanced technologies. Still, it also increases the exposure to many security privacy risks like (1) maliciously manipulating the CPS data and sensors to compromise the integrity of the system (2) launching internal/external cyber-physical attacks on the central controller dependent CPS systems to cause a single point of failure issues (3) running malicious data and query analytics on the CPS data to identify internal insights and use it for achieving financial incentive. Moreover, (CPS) data privacy protection during sharing, aggregating, and publishing has also become challenging nowadays because most of the existing CPS security and privacy solutions have drawbacks, like (a) lack of a proper vulnerability characterization model to accurately identify where privacy is needed, (b) ignoring data providers privacy preference, (c) using uniform privacy protection which may create inadequate privacy for some provider while overprotecting others.Therefore, to address these issues, the primary purpose of this thesis is to orchestrate the development of a decentralized, p2p connected data privacy preservation model to improve the CPS system's integrity against malicious attacks. In that regard, we adopt blockchain to facilitate a decentralized and highly secured system model for CPS with self-defensive capabilities. This proposed model will mitigate data manipulation attacks from malicious entities by introducing bloom filter-based fast CPS device identity validation and Merkle tree-based fast data verification. Finally, the blockchain consensus will help to keep consistency and eliminate malicious entities from the protection framework. Furthermore, to address the data privacy issues in CPS, we propose a personalized data privacy model by introducing a standard vulnerability profiling library (SVPL) to characterize and quantify the CPS vulnerabilities and identify the necessary privacy requirements. Based on this model, we present our personalized privacy framework (PDP) in which Laplace noise is added based on the individual node's selected privacy preferences. Finally, combining these two proposed methods, we demonstrate that the blockchain-based system model is scalable and fast enough for CPS data's integrity verification. Also, the proposed PDP model can attain better data privacy by eliminating the trade-off between privacy, utility, and risk of losing information

A Proposed Intelligent Model with Optimization Algorithm for Clustering Energy Consumption in Public Buildings

Abdelaziz, A., Santos, V., & Dias, M. S. (2023). A Proposed Intelligent Model with Optimization Algorithm for Clustering Energy Consumption in Public Buildings. International Journal of Advanced Computer Science and Applications, 14(9), 136-152. [15]. https://doi.org/10.14569/IJACSA.2023.0140915 --- This work has been supported by Portuguese funds through FCT-Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia, Instituto Público (IP), under the project FCT UIDB/04466/2020 by Information Sciences and Technologies and Architecture Research Center (ISTAR-IUL), and this work has also been supported by Information Management Research Center (MagIC)-Information Management School of NOVA University LisbonRecently, intelligent applications gained a significant role in the energy management of public buildings due to their ability to enhance energy consumption performance. Energy management of these buildings represents a big challenge due to their unexpected energy consumption characteristics and the deficiency of design guidelines for energy efficiency and sustainability solutions. Therefore, an analysis of energy consumption patterns in public buildings becomes necessary. This reveals the significance of understanding and classifying energy consumption patterns in these buildings. This study seeks to find the optimal intelligent technique for classifying energy consumption of public buildings into levels (e.g., low, medium, and high), find the critical factors that influence energy consumption, and finally, find the scientific rules (If-Then rules) to help decision-makers for determining the energy consumption level in each building. To achieve the objectives of this study, correlation coefficient analysis was used to determine critical factors that influence on energy consumption of public buildings; two intelligent models were used to determine the number of clusters of energy consumption patterns which are Self Organizing Map (SOM) and Batch-SOM based on Principal Component Analysis (PCA). SOM outperforms Batch-SOM in terms of quantization error. The quantization error of SOM and Batch-SOM is 8.97 and 9.24, respectively. K-means with a genetic algorithm were used to predict cluster levels in each building. By analyzing cluster levels, If-Then rules have been extracted, so needs that decision-makers determine the most energyconsuming buildings. In addition, this study helps decisionmakers in the energy field to rationalize the consumption of occupants of public buildings in the times that consume the most energy and change energy suppliers to those buildings.publishersversionpublishe