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Advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) enables utilities to obtain granular energy consumption data, which offers a unique opportunity to design customer segmentation strategies based on their impact on various operational metrics in distribution grids. However, performing utility-scale segmentation for unobservable customers with only monthly billing information, remains a challenging problem. To address this challenge, we propose a new metric, the coincident monthly peak contribution (CMPC), that quantifies the contribution of individual customers to system peak demand. Furthermore, a novel multi-state machine learning-based segmentation method is developed that estimates CMPC for customers without smart meters (SMs): first, a clustering technique is used to build a databank containing typical daily load patterns in different seasons using the SM data of observable customers. Next, to associate unobservable customers with the discovered typical load profiles, a classification approach is leveraged to compute the likelihood of daily consumption patterns for different unobservable households. In the third stage, a weighted clusterwise regression (WCR) model is utilized to estimate the CMPC of unobservable customers using their monthly billing data and the outcomes of the classification module. The proposed segmentation methodology has been tested and verified using real utility data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cold load pick-up (CLPU) has been a critical concern to utilities. Researchers and industry practitioners have underlined the impact of CLPU on distribution system design and service restoration. The recent large-scale deployment of smart meters has provided the industry with a huge amount of data that are highly granular, both temporally and spatially. In this paper, a data-driven framework is proposed for assessing CLPU demand of residential customers using smart meter data. The proposed framework consists of two interconnected layers: 1) At the feeder level, a nonlinear autoregression model is applied to estimate the diversified demand during the system restoration and calculate the CLPU demand ratio. 2) At the customer level, Gaussian mixture models and probabilistic reasoning are used to quantify the CLPU demand increase. The proposed methodology has been verified using real smart meter data and outage cases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we present an efficient computational framework with the purpose of generating weighted pseudo-measurements to improve the quality of distribution system state estimation (DSSE) and provide observability with advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) against unobservable customers and missing data. The proposed technique is based on a game-theoretic expansion of relevance vector machines (RVMs). This platform is able to estimate the nodal power consumption and quantify its uncertainty while reducing the prohibitive computational burden of model training for large AMI datasets. To achieve this objective, the large training set is decomposed and distributed among multiple parallel learning entities. The resulting estimations from the parallel RVMs are then combined using a game-theoretic model based on the idea of repeated games with vector payoff. It is observed that through this approach and by exploiting the seasonal changes in customers’ behavior the accuracy of pseudo-measurements can be considerably improved, while introducing robustness against bad training data samples. The proposed pseudo-measurement generation model is integrated into a DSSE using a closed-loop information system, which takes advantage of a branch current state estimator (BCSE) to further improve the performance of the designed machine learning framework. This method has been tested on a practical distribution feeder model with smart meter data for verification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a novel data-driven method that determines the daily consumption patterns of customers without smart meters (SMs) to enhance the observability of distribution systems. Using the proposed method, the daily consumption of unobserved customers is extracted from their monthly billing data based on three machine learning models. In the first model, a spectral clustering algorithm is used to infer the typical daily load profiles of customers with SMs. Each typical daily load behavior represents a distinct class of customer behavior. In the second module, a multi-timescale learning model is trained to estimate the hourly consumption using monthly energy data for the customers of each class. The third stage leverages a recursive Bayesian learning method and branch current state estimation residuals to estimate the daily load profiles of unobserved customers without SMs. The proposed data-driven method has been tested and verified using real utility data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we study the behavior of a day-ahead (DA) retail electrical energy market with price-based demand response from air conditioning (AC) loads through a hierarchical multiagent framework, employing a machine learning approach. At the top level of the hierarchy, a retailer agent buys energy from the DA wholesale market and sells it to the consumers. The goal of the retailer agent is to maximize its profit by setting the optimal retail prices, considering the response of the price-sensitive loads. Upon receiving the retail prices, at the lower level of the hierarchy, the AC agents employ a ${Q}$ -learning algorithm to optimize their consumption patterns through modifying the temperature set-points of the devices, considering both consumption costs and users’ comfort preferences. Since the retailer agent does not have direct access to the AC loads’ underlying dynamics and decision process (i.e., incomplete information) the data privacy of the consumers becomes a source of uncertainty in the retailer’s decision model. The retailer relies on techniques from the field of machine learning to develop a reliable model of the aggregate behavior of the price-sensitive loads to reduce the uncertainty of the decision-making process. Hence, a multiagent framework based on machine learning enables us to address issues such as interoperability and decision-making under incomplete information in a system that maintains the data privacy of the consumers. We will show that using the proposed model, all the agents are able to optimize their behavior simultaneously. Simulation results show that the proposed approach leads to a reduction in overall power consumption cost as the system converges to its equilibrium. This also coincides with maximization in the retailer’s profit. We will also show that the same decision architecture can be used to reduce peak load to defer/avoid distribution system upgrades under high penetration of photo-voltaic power in the distribution feeder. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]