Improving Electric Energy Consumption Prediction Using CNN and Bi-LSTM

Power consumption prediction for electric vehicle charging stations and forecasting income

Electric vehicles (EVs) are the future of the automobile industry, as they produce zero emissions and address environmental and health concerns caused by traditional fuel-poared vehicles. As more people shift towards EVs, the demand for power consumption forecasting is increasing to manage the charging stations effectively. Predicting power consumption can help optimize operations, prevent grid overloading, and power outages, and assist companies in estimating the number of charging stations required to meet demand. The paper uses three time series models to predict the electricity demand for charging stations, and the SARIMA (Seasonal Auto Regressive Integrated Moving Average) model outperforms the ARMA (Auto Regressive Moving Average) and ARIMA (Auto Regressive Integrated Moving Average) models, with the least RMSE (Root Mean Squared Error), MAE (Mean Absolute Error) and MAPE (Mean Absolute Percentage Error) scores in forecasting power demand and revenue. The data used for validation consists of charging activities over a four-year period from public charging outlets in Colorado, six months of charging data from ChargeMOD's public charging terminals in Kerala, India. Power usage is also forecasted based on wheels of vehicles, and finally, a plan subscription data from the same source is utilized to anticipate income, that helps companies develop pricing strategies to maximize profits while remaining competitive. Utility firms and charging networks may use accurate power consumption forecasts for a variety of purposes, such as power scheduling and determining the expected energy requirements for charging stations. Ultimately, precise power consumption forecasting can assist in the effective planning and design of EV charging infrastructure. The main aim of this study is to create a good time series model which can estimate the electric vehicle charging stations usage of power and verify if the firm has a good income along with some accuracy measures. The results show that SARIMA model plays a vital role in providing us with accurate information. According to the data and study here, four wheelers use more power than two and three wheelers. Also, DC charging facility uses more electricity than AC charging stations. These results can be used to determine the cost to operate the EVs and its subscriptions.

Arrhythmia Classification Based on Bi-Directional Long Short-Term Memory and Multi-Task Group Method

Early and accurate classification of arrhythmia helps the experts to select the treatment for the patient to increase the recovery rate. The deep learning method of convolution neural network (CNN) is used for classification, and this has an overfitting problem. In this research, the multi-task group bi-directional long short term memory (MTGBi-LSTM) method is proposed to increases the performance of arrhythmia classification. The multi-task learning technique learns two ECG signals in shared representation for effective learning. The global and intra LSTM method selects the relevant feature and easily escapes from local optima. The MTGBi-LSTM model learns the unique features in shared representation that helps to overcome overfitting problem and increases the learning rate of the model. The MTGBi-LSTM model in arrhythmia classification is evaluated on MIT-BIH dataset. The MTGBi-LSTM model has 96.48% accuracy, 97.73% sensitivity, existing AFibNet has 96.36% accuracy, and 93.65% sensitivity for arrhythmia classification in CPSC 2018 dataset.

K-Means Clustering and Bidirectional Long- and Short-Term Neural Networks for Predicting Performance Degradation Trends of Built-In Relays in Meters

The built-in relay in a meter is a key control component of a smart meter, and its reliability determines whether the user can use electricity safely and smoothly. In this paper, the degradation characteristics of the arc-burning energy are enhanced by the method of K-means clustering to replace degradation data, such as the overtravel time, release time, and other data. In existing methods, the meter needs to be disassembled to describe the degradation trend of the meter relay. The proposed method is combined with a bidirectional long short-term memory (Bi-LSTM) neural network to predict the degradation trend of the relay's performance. In this paper, K-means clustering is used to enhance the extraction of arc energy data features, and then the arc energy data obtained from the reliability lifetime test is assessed to predict the degradation trend of the meter relay by means of a bidirectional LSTM.

A watershed water quality prediction model based on attention mechanism and Bi-LSTM

Accurate prediction of water quality contributes to the intelligent management and control of watershed ecology. Water Quality data has time series characteristics, but the existing models only focus on the forward time series when LSTM is introduced and do not consider the effect of the reverse time series on the model. Also did not take into account the different contributions of water quality sequences to the model at different moments. In order to solve this problem, this paper proposes a watershed water quality prediction model called AT-BILSTM. The model mainly contains a Bi-LSTM layer and a temporal attention layer and introduces an attention mechanism after bidirectional feature extraction of water quality time series data to highlight the data series that have a critical impact on the prediction results. The effectiveness of the method was verified with actual datasets from four monitoring stations in Lanzhou section of the Yellow River basin in China. After comparing with the reference model, the results show that the proposed model combines the bidirectional nonlinear mapping capability of Bi-LSTM and the feature weighting feature of the attention mechanism. Taking Fuhe Bridge as an example, compared with the original LSTM model, the RMSE and MAE of the model are reduced to 0.101 and 0.059, respectively, and the R2 is improved to 0.970, which has the best prediction performance among the four cross-sections and can provide a decision basis for the comprehensive water quality management and pollutant control in the basin.

Novel double-layer bidirectional LSTM network with improved attention mechanism for predicting energy consumption

For power generation management and power system dispatching, it is of big significance to predict the consumption of electric energy accurately. For the sake of improving the prediction accuracy of power consumption, taking the complex features of time series data into consideration, a novel neural network sandwich structure with an improved attention mechanism is inserted into the double-layer bidirectional long short-term memory network shortened as A-DBLSTM is put forward in this article. In A-DBLSTM, compared with traditional attention mechanism, the presented attention mechanism focuses on different features in each time unit and the A-DBLLSTM network extracts time information in sequence. The parameter optimization of A-DBLSTM is based on the method of particle swarm optimization (PSO). For confirming the effectiveness and feasibility of A-DBLSTM, case studies using two datasets of the hourly temperature values and power loads between 2012 and 2014 and the electric energy consumption are carried out. The experimental results indicate that the presented A-DBLSTM with the novel sandwich network structure achieves superior performance in the aspects of the mean square error, root mean square, the average absolute error and the mean absolute percentage error to other advanced methods. What is more, the factors that have the greatest impact on the prediction performance can be found through analyzing the heatmap of the attention layer.

Incorporating causality in energy consumption forecasting using deep neural networks

Forecasting energy demand has been a critical process in various decision support systems regarding consumption planning, distribution strategies, and energy policies. Traditionally, forecasting energy consumption or demand methods included trend analyses, regression, and auto-regression. With advancements in machine learning methods, algorithms such as support vector machines, artificial neural networks, and random forests became prevalent. In recent times, with an unprecedented improvement in computing capabilities, deep learning algorithms are increasingly used to forecast energy consumption/demand. In this contribution, a relatively novel approach is employed to use long-term memory. Weather data was used to forecast the energy consumption from three datasets, with an additional piece of information in the deep learning architecture. This additional information carries the causal relationships between the weather indicators and energy consumption. This architecture with the causal information is termed as entangled long short term memory. The results show that the entangled long short term memory outperforms the state-of-the-art deep learning architecture (bidirectional long short term memory). The theoretical and practical implications of these results are discussed in terms of decision-making and energy management systems.

Data Reduction and Reconstruction of Wind Turbine Wake Employing Data Driven Approaches

Data driven approaches are utilized for optimal sensor placement as well as for velocity prediction of wind turbine wakes. In this work, several methods are investigated for suitability in the clustering analysis and for predicting the time history of the flow field. The studies start by applying a proper orthogonal decomposition (POD) technique to extract the dynamics of the flow. This is followed by evaluations of different hyperparameters of the clustering and machine learning algorithms as well as their impacts on the prediction accuracy. Two test cases are considered: (1) the wake of a cylinder and (2) the wake of a rotating wind turbine rotor exposed to complex flow conditions. The training and test data for both cases are obtained from high fidelity CFD approaches. The studies reveal that the combination of a classification-based machine learning algorithm for optimal sensor placement and Bi-LSTM is sufficient for predicting periodic signals, but a more advanced technique is required for the highly complex data of the turbine near wake. This is done by exploiting the dynamics of the wake from the set of POD modes for flow field reconstruction. A satisfactory accuracy is achieved for an appropriately chosen prediction horizon of the Bi-LSTM networks. The obtained results show that data-driven approaches for wind turbine wake prediction can offer an alternative to conventional prediction approaches.

Multiscale convolutional recurrent neural network for residential building electricity consumption prediction

The prediction of residential building electricity consumption can help provide an early warning regarding abnormal energy use and optimize energy supply. In this study, a multiscale convolutional recurrent neural network (MCRNN) is proposed to predict residential building electricity consumption. The MCRNN model uses multiscale convolutional units to collect different information on environmental factors, such as temperature, air pressure, light, and uses a bidirectional recurrent neural network (Bi-RNN) to extract the long-term dependence information of these factors. In addition, a recurrent convolutional connection is used to filter the most useful multiscale and long-term information in the MCRNN model. The accuracy of MCRNN is evaluated through an experiment using real data. The results show that MCRNN performs better than the other models. For instance, compared with the support vector regression (SVR) and random forest (RF) models, the MCRNN model has a 47.83% and 38.72% lower root mean square error (RMSE), respectively. The MCRNN model also shows a 37.81% and 70.38% higher accuracy, respectively, compared to the SVR and RF models.

CBLSTM-AE: A Hybrid Deep Learning Framework for Predicting Energy Consumption

Multisource energy data, including from distributed energy resources and its multivariate nature, necessitate the integration of robust data predictive frameworks to minimise prediction error. This work presents a hybrid deep learning framework to accurately predict the energy consumption of different building types, both commercial and domestic, spanning different countries, including Canada and the UK. Specifically, we propose architectures comprising convolutional neural network (CNN), an autoencoder (AE) with bidirectional long short-term memory (LSTM), and bidirectional LSTM BLSTM). The CNN layer extracts important features from the dataset and the AE-BLSTM and LSTM layers are used for prediction. We use the individual household electric power consumption dataset from the University of California, Irvine to compare the skillfulness of the proposed framework to the state-of-the-art frameworks. Results show performance improvement in computation time of 56% and 75.2%, and mean squared error (MSE) of 80% and 98.7% in comparison with a CNN BLSTM-based framework (EECP-CBL) and vanilla LSTM, respectively. In addition, we use various datasets from Canada and the UK to further validate the generalisation ability of the proposed framework to underfitting and overfitting, which was tested on real consumers’ smart boxes. The results show that the framework generalises well to varying data and constraints, giving an average MSE of ∼0.09 across all datasets, demonstrating its robustness to different building types, locations, weather, and load distributions.

A robust framework for shoulder implant X-ray image classification

Purpose

Medical images are increasingly popular; therefore, the analysis of these images based on deep learning helps diagnose diseases become more and more essential and necessary. Recently, the shoulder implant X-ray image classification (SIXIC) dataset that includes X-ray images of implanted shoulder prostheses produced by four manufacturers was released. The implant's model detection helps to select the correct equipment and procedures in the upcoming surgery.

Design/methodology/approach

This study proposes a robust model named X-Net to improve the predictability for shoulder implants X-ray image classification in the SIXIC dataset. The X-Net model utilizes the Squeeze and Excitation (SE) block integrated into Residual Network (ResNet) module. The SE module aims to weigh each feature map extracted from ResNet, which aids in improving the performance. The feature extraction process of X-Net model is performed by both modules: ResNet and SE modules. The final feature is obtained by incorporating the extracted features from the above steps, which brings more important characteristics of X-ray images in the input dataset. Next, X-Net uses this fine-grained feature to classify the input images into four classes (Cofield, Depuy, Zimmer and Tornier) in the SIXIC dataset.

Findings

Experiments are conducted to show the proposed approach's effectiveness compared with other state-of-the-art methods for SIXIC. The experimental results indicate that the approach outperforms the various experimental methods in terms of several performance metrics. In addition, the proposed approach provides the new state of the art results in all performance metrics, such as accuracy, precision, recall, F1-score and area under the curve (AUC), for the experimental dataset.

Originality/value

The proposed method with high predictive performance can be used to assist in the treatment of injured shoulder joints.

Modeling Energy Demand—A Systematic Literature Review

In this article, a systematic literature review of 419 articles on energy demand modeling, published between 2015 and 2020, is presented. This provides researchers with an exhaustive overview of the examined literature and classification of techniques for energy demand modeling. Unlike in existing literature reviews, in this comprehensive study all of the following aspects of energy demand models are analyzed: techniques, prediction accuracy, inputs, energy carrier, sector, temporal horizon, and spatial granularity. Readers benefit from easy access to a broad literature base and find decision support when choosing suitable data-model combinations for their projects. Results have been compiled in comprehensive figures and tables, providing a structured summary of the literature, and containing direct references to the analyzed articles. Drawbacks of techniques are discussed as well as countermeasures. The results show that among the articles, machine learning (ML) techniques are used the most, are mainly applied to short-term electricity forecasting on a regional level and rely on historic load as their main data source. Engineering-based models are less dependent on historic load data and cover appliance consumption on long temporal horizons. Metaheuristic and uncertainty techniques are often used in hybrid models. Statistical techniques are frequently used for energy demand modeling as well and often serve as benchmarks for other techniques. Among the articles, the accuracy measured by mean average percentage error (MAPE) proved to be on similar levels for all techniques. This review eases the reader into the subject matter by presenting the emphases that have been made in the current literature, suggesting future research directions, and providing the basis for quantitative testing of hypotheses regarding applicability and dominance of specific methods for sub-categories of demand modeling.

Influencing Factors Evaluation of Machine Learning-Based Energy Consumption Prediction

Modern computing resources, including machine learning-based techniques, are used to maintain stability between the demand and supply of electricity. Machine learning is widely used for the prediction of energy consumption. The researchers present several artificial intelligence and machine learning-based methods to improve the prediction accuracy of energy consumption. However, the discrepancy between actual energy consumption and predicted energy consumption is still challenging. Various factors, including changes in weather, holidays, and weekends, affect prediction accuracy. This article analyses the overall prediction using error curve learning and a hybrid model. Actual energy consumption data of Jeju island, South Korea, has been used for experimental purposes. We have used a hybrid ML model consisting of Catboost, Xgboost, and Multi-layer perceptron for the prediction. Then we analyze the factors that affect the week-ahead (WA) and 48 h prediction results. Mean error on weekdays is recorded as 2.78%, for weekends 2.79%, and for special days it is recorded as 4.28%. We took into consideration significant predicting errors and looked into the reasons behind those errors. Furthermore, we analyzed whether factors, such as a sudden change in temperature and typhoons, had an effect on energy consumption. Finally, the authors have considered the other factors, such as public holidays and weekends, to analyze the significant errors in the prediction. This study can be helpful for policymakers to make policies according to the error-causing factors.

Atrous Convolutions and Residual GRU Based Architecture for Matching Power Demand with Supply

Nowadays, for efficient energy management, local demand-supply matching in power grid is emerging research domain. However, energy demand is increasing day by day in many countries due to rapid growth of the population and most of their work being reliant on electronic devices. This problem has highlighted the significance of effectively matching power demand with supply for optimal energy management. To resolve this issue, we present an intelligent deep learning framework that integrates Atrous Convolutional Layers (ACL) with Residual Gated Recurrent Units (RGRU) to establish balance between the demand and supply. Moreover, it accurately predicts short-term energy and delivers a systematic method of communication between consumers and energy distributors as well. To cope with the varying nature of electricity data, first data acquisition step is performed where data are collected from various sources such as smart meters and solar plants. In the second step a pre-processing method is applied on raw data to normalize and clean the data. Next, the refined data are passed to ACL for spatial feature extraction. Finally, a sequential learning model RGRU is used that learns from complicated patterns for the final output. The proposed model obtains the smallest values of Mean Square Error (MSE) including 0.1753, 0.0001, 0.0177 over IHEPC, KCB, and Solar datasets, respectively, which manifests better performance as compared to existing approaches.

Real Time Multipurpose Smart Waste Classification Model for Efficient Recycling in Smart Cities Using Multilayer Convolutional Neural Network and Perceptron

Urbanization is a big concern for both developed and developing countries in recent years. People shift themselves and their families to urban areas for the sake of better education and a modern lifestyle. Due to rapid urbanization, cities are facing huge challenges, one of which is waste management, as the volume of waste is directly proportional to the people living in the city. The municipalities and the city administrations use the traditional wastage classification techniques which are manual, very slow, inefficient and costly. Therefore, automatic waste classification and management is essential for the cities that are being urbanized for the better recycling of waste. Better recycling of waste gives the opportunity to reduce the amount of waste sent to landfills by reducing the need to collect new raw material. In this paper, the idea of a real-time smart waste classification model is presented that uses a hybrid approach to classify waste into various classes. Two machine learning models, a multilayer perceptron and multilayer convolutional neural network (ML-CNN), are implemented. The multilayer perceptron is used to provide binary classification, i.e., metal or non-metal waste, and the CNN identifies the class of non-metal waste. A camera is placed in front of the waste conveyor belt, which takes a picture of the waste and classifies it. Upon successful classification, an automatic hand hammer is used to push the waste into the assigned labeled bucket. Experiments were carried out in a real-time environment with image segmentation. The training, testing, and validation accuracy of the purposed model was 0.99% under different training batches with different input features.

Sequential Learning-Based Energy Consumption Prediction Model for Residential and Commercial Sectors

The use of electrical energy is directly proportional to the increase in global population, both concerning growing industrialization and rising residential demand. The need to achieve a balance between electrical energy production and consumption inspires researchers to develop forecasting models for optimal and economical energy use. Mostly, the residential and industrial sectors use metering sensors that only measure the consumed energy but are unable to manage electricity. In this paper, we present a comparative analysis of a variety of deep features with several sequential learning models to select the optimized hybrid architecture for energy consumption prediction. The best results are achieved using convolutional long short-term memory (ConvLSTM) integrated with bidirectional long short-term memory (BiLSTM). The ConvLSTM initially extracts features from the input data to produce encoded sequences that are decoded by BiLSTM and then proceeds with a final dense layer for energy consumption prediction. The overall framework consists of preprocessing raw data, extracting features, training the sequential model, and then evaluating it. The proposed energy consumption prediction model outperforms existing models over publicly available datasets, including Household and Korean commercial building datasets.

A Time Series Sustainability Assessment of a Partial Energy Portfolio Transition

Energy portfolios are overwhelmingly dependent on fossil fuel resources that perpetuate the consequences associated with climate change. Therefore, it is imperative to transition to more renewable alternatives to limit further harm to the environment. This study presents a univariate time series prediction model that evaluates sustainability outcomes of partial energy transitions. Future electricity generation at the state-level is predicted using exponential smoothing and autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA). The best prediction results are then used as an input for a sustainability assessment of a proposed transition by calculating carbon, water, land, and cost footprints. Missouri, USA was selected as a model testbed due to its dependence on coal. Of the time series methods, ARIMA exhibited the best performance and was used to predict annual electricity generation over a 10-year period. The proposed transition consisted of a one-percent annual decrease of coal’s portfolio share to be replaced with an equal share of solar and wind supply. The sustainability outcomes of the transition demonstrate decreases in carbon and water footprints but increases in land and cost footprints. Decision makers can use the results presented here to better inform strategic provisioning of critical resources in the context of proposed energy transitions.

PV Power Prediction, Using CNN-LSTM Hybrid Neural Network Model. Case of Study: Temixco-Morelos, México

Due to the intermittent nature of solar energy, accurate photovoltaic power predictions are very important for energy integration into existing energy systems. The evolution of deep learning has also opened the possibility to apply neural network models to predict time series, achieving excellent results. In this paper, a five layer CNN-LSTM model is proposed for photovoltaic power predictions using real data from a location in Temixco, Morelos in Mexico. In the proposed hybrid model, the convolutional layer acts like a filter, extracting local features of the data; then the temporal features are extracted by the long short-term memory network. Finally, the performance of the hybrid model with five layers is compared with a single model (a single LSTM), a CNN-LSTM hybrid model with two layers and two well known popular benchmarks. The results also shows that the hybrid neural network model has better prediction effect than the two layer hybrid model, the single prediction model, the Lasso regression or the Ridge regression.

Multiple Electric Energy Consumption Forecasting Using a Cluster-Based Strategy for Transfer Learning in Smart Building

Electric energy consumption forecasting is an interesting, challenging, and important issue in energy management and equipment efficiency improvement. Existing approaches are predictive models that have the ability to predict for a specific profile, i.e., a time series of a whole building or an individual household in a smart building. In practice, there are many profiles in each smart building, which leads to time-consuming and expensive system resources. Therefore, this study develops a robust framework for the Multiple Electric Energy Consumption forecasting (MEC) of a smart building using Transfer Learning and Long Short-Term Memory (TLL), the so-called MEC-TLL framework. In this framework, we first employ a k-means clustering algorithm to cluster the daily load demand of many profiles in the training set. In this phase, we also perform Silhouette analysis to specify the optimal number of clusters for the experimental datasets. Next, this study develops the MEC training algorithm, which utilizes a cluster-based strategy for transfer learning the Long Short-Term Memory models to reduce the computational time. Finally, extensive experiments are conducted to compare the computational time and different performance metrics for multiple electric energy consumption forecasting on two smart buildings in South Korea. The experimental results indicate that our proposed approach is capable of economical overheads while achieving superior performances. Therefore, the proposed approach can be applied effectively for intelligent energy management in smart buildings.

Augmented EMTCNN: A Fast and Accurate Facial Landmark Detection Network

Facial landmarks represent prominent feature points on the face that can be used as anchor points in many face-related tasks. So far, a lot of research has been done with the aim of achieving efficient extraction of landmarks from facial images. Employing a large number of feature points for landmark detection and tracking usually requires excessive processing time. On the contrary, relying on too few feature points cannot accurately represent diverse landmark properties, such as shape. To extract the 68 most popular facial landmark points efficiently, in our previous study, we proposed a model called EMTCNN that extended the multi-task cascaded convolutional neural network for real-time face landmark detection. To improve the detection accuracy, in this study, we augment the EMTCNN model by using two convolution techniques—dilated convolution and CoordConv. The former makes it possible to increase the filter size without a significant increase in computation time. The latter enables the spatial coordinate information of landmarks to be reflected in the model. We demonstrate that our model can improve the detection accuracy while maintaining the processing speed.

Towards Efficient Electricity Forecasting in Residential and Commercial Buildings: A Novel Hybrid CNN with a LSTM-AE based Framework

Due to industrialization and the rising demand for energy, global energy consumption has been rapidly increasing. Recent studies show that the biggest portion of energy is consumed in residential buildings, i.e., in European Union countries up to 40% of the total energy is consumed by households. Most residential buildings and industrial zones are equipped with smart sensors such as metering electric sensors, that are inadequately utilized for better energy management. In this paper, we develop a hybrid convolutional neural network (CNN) with an long short-term memory autoencoder (LSTM-AE) model for future energy prediction in residential and commercial buildings. The central focus of this research work is to utilize the smart meters’ data for energy forecasting in order to enable appropriate energy management in buildings. We performed extensive research using several deep learning-based forecasting models and proposed an optimal hybrid CNN with the LSTM-AE model. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to incorporate the aforementioned models under the umbrella of a unified framework with some utility preprocessing. Initially, the CNN model extracts features from the input data, which are then fed to the LSTM-encoder to generate encoded sequences. The encoded sequences are decoded by another following LSTM-decoder to advance it to the final dense layer for energy prediction. The experimental results using different evaluation metrics show that the proposed hybrid model works well. Also, it records the smallest value for mean square error (MSE), mean absolute error (MAE), root mean square error (RMSE) and mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) when compared to other state-of-the-art forecasting methods over the UCI residential building dataset. Furthermore, we conducted experiments on Korean commercial building data and the results indicate that our proposed hybrid model is a worthy contribution to energy forecasting.

Solving the Cold-Start Problem in Short-Term Load Forecasting Using Tree-Based Methods

An energy-management system requires accurate prediction of the electric load for optimal energy management. However, if the amount of electric load data is insufficient, it is challenging to perform an accurate prediction. To address this issue, we propose a novel electric load forecasting scheme using the electric load data of diverse buildings. We first divide the electric energy consumption data into training and test sets. Then, we construct multivariate random forest (MRF)-based forecasting models according to each building except the target building in the training set and a random forest (RF)-based forecasting model using the limited electric load data of the target building in the test set. In the test set, we compare the electric load of the target building with that of other buildings to select the MRF model that is the most similar to the target building. Then, we predict the electric load of the target building using its input variables via the selected MRF model. We combine the MRF and RF models by considering the different electric load patterns on weekdays and holidays. Experimental results demonstrate that combining the two models can achieve satisfactory prediction performance even if the electric data of only one day are available for the target building.

A Two-Stage Industrial Load Forecasting Scheme for Day-Ahead Combined Cooling, Heating and Power Scheduling

Smart grid systems, which have gained much attention due to its ability to reduce operation and management costs of power systems, consist of diverse components including energy storage, renewable energy, and combined cooling, heating and power (CCHP) systems. The CCHP has been investigated to reduce energy costs by using the thermal energy generated during the power generation process. For efficient utilization of CCHP and numerous power generation systems, accurate short-term load forecasting (STLF) is necessary. So far, even though many single algorithm-based STLF models have been proposed, they showed limited success in terms of applicability and coverage. This problem can be alleviated by combining such single algorithm-based models in ways that take advantage of their strengths. In this paper, we propose a novel two-stage STLF scheme; extreme gradient boosting and random forest models are executed in the first stage, and deep neural networks are executed in the second stage to combine them. To show the effectiveness of our proposed scheme, we compare our model with other popular single algorithm-based forecasting models and then show how much electric charges can be saved by operating CCHP based on the schedules made by the economic analysis on the predicted electric loads.

Multi-State Energy Classifier to Evaluate the Performance of the NILM Algorithm

With the large-scale deployment of smart meters worldwide, research in non-intrusive load monitoring (NILM) has seen a significant rise due to its dual use of real-time monitoring of end-user appliances and user-centric feedback of power consumption usage. NILM is a technique for estimating the state and the power consumption of an individual appliance in a consumer's premise using a single point of measurement device such as a smart meter. Although there are several existing NILM techniques, there is no meaningful and accurate metric to evaluate these NILM techniques for multi-state devices such as the fridge, heat pump, etc. In this paper, we demonstrate the inadequacy of the existing metrics and propose a new metric that combines both event classification and energy estimation of an operational state to give a more realistic and accurate evaluation of the performance of the existing NILM techniques. In particular, we use unsupervised clustering techniques to identify the operational states of the device from a labeled dataset to compute a penalty threshold for predictions that are too far away from the ground truth. Our work includes experimental evaluation of the state-of-the-art NILM techniques on widely used datasets of power consumption data measured in a real-world environment.