DBSCAN-based energy users clustering for performance enhancement of deep learning model

Background:Due to rapid progress in the fields of artificial intelligence, machine learning and deep learning, the power grids are transforming into Smart Grids (SG) which are versatile, reliable, intelligent and stable. The power consumption of the energy users is varying throughout the day as well as in different days of the week. Power consumption forecasting is of vital importance for the sustainable management and operation of SG. Methodology:In this work, the aim is to apply clustering for dividing a smart residential community into several group of similar profile energy user, which will be effective for developing and training representative deep neural network (DNN) models for power load forecasting of users in respective groups. The DNN models is composed of convolutional neural network (CNN) followed by LSTM layers for feature extraction and sequence learning respectively. The DNN For experimentation, the Smart Grid Smart City (SGSC) project database is used and its energy users are grouped into various clusters. Results:The residential community is divided into four groups of customers based on the chosen criterion where Group 1, 2, 3 and 4 contains 14 percent, 22 percent, 19 percent and 45 percent users respectively. Almost half of the population (45 percent) of the considered residential community exhibits less than 23 outliers in their electricity consumption patterns. The rest of the population is divided into three groups, where specialized deep learning models developed and trained for respective groups are able to achieve higher forecasting accuracy. The results of our proposed approach will assist researchers and utility companies by requiring fewer specialized deep-learning models for accurate forecasting of users who belong to various groups of similar-profile energy consumption.