text: The increasing use of renewable energy sources with variable output, such as solar photovoltaic and wind power generation, calls for Smart Grids that effectively manage flexible loads and energy storage. The ability to forecast consumption at different locations in distribution systems will be a key capability of Smart Grids. The goal of this paper is to benchmark state-of-the-art methods for forecasting electricity demand on the household level across different granularities and time scales in an explorative way, thereby revealing potential shortcomings and find promising directions for future research in this area. We apply a number of forecasting methods including ARIMA, neural networks, and exponential smoothening using several strategies for training data selection, in particular day type and sliding window based strategies. We consider forecasting horizons ranging between 15 minutes and 24 hours. Our evaluation is based on two data sets containing the power usage of individual appliances at second time granularity collected over the course of several months. The results indicate that forecasting accuracy varies significantly depending on the choice of forecasting methods strategy and the parameter configuration. Measured by the Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE), the considered state-of-the-art forecasting methods rarely beat corresponding persistence forecasts. Overall, we observed MAPEs in the range between 5 and >100 . The average MAPE for the first data set was 30 , while it was 85 for the other data set. These results show big room for improvement. Based on the identified trends and experiences from our experiments, we contribute a detailed discussion of promising future research.
  @cite_26: The increasing use of renewable energy is leading to a paradigm shift in operating electrical grids. Production is moving away from centralized power plants to decentralized sources like solar panels and windmills. One consequence of this development is the need for managing supply and demand in local distribution grids in a "smart" way, which also implies the capability to forecast the demand for electric power closer to the end consumer and on shorter time scales than today. In this paper, we describe a system prototype for electricity demand forecasting based on highly disaggregated data from sensors deployed in homes and evaluate its performance both with respect to forecasting accuracy and ICT resource requirements. The data we use for our evaluation was collected in a pilot trial. Our system prototype combines complex event processing with state-of-the-art forecasting capabilities. For short-term forecasts, we observed average error reductions of up to 98 percentage points compared to average demand profiles. Our experiments also show the applicability of our approach at large scale. We were able to run the forecasting service for 1,000 households in parallel on one off-the-shelf server.
  @cite_22: 
  @cite_9: The continuous growth of energy needs and the fact that unpredictable energy demand is mostly served by unsustainable (i.e. fossil-fuel) power generators have given rise to the development of Demand Response (DR) mechanisms for flattening energy demand. Building effective DR mechanisms and user awareness on power consumption can significantly benefit from fine-grained monitoring of user consumption at the appliance level. However, installing and maintaining such a monitoring infrastructure in residential settings can be quite expensive. In this paper, we study the problem of fine-grained appliance power-consumption monitoring based on one house-level meter and few plug-level meters. We explore the trade-off between monitoring accuracy and cost, and exhaustively find the minimum subset of plug-level meters that maximize accuracy. As exhaustive search is time- and resource-consuming, we define a heuristic approach that finds the optimal set of plug-level meters without utilizing any other sets of plug-level meters. Based on experiments with real data, we found that few plug-level meters - when appropriately placed - can very accurately disaggregate the total real power consumption of a residential setting and verified the effectiveness of our heuristic approach.
  @cite_29: Detecting when a household is occupied by its residents is fundamental to enable a number of home automation applications. Current systems for occupancy detection usually require the installation of dedicated sensors, like passive infrared sensors, magnetic reed switches, or cameras. In this paper, we investigate the suitability of digital electricity meters -- which are already available in millions of households worldwide -- to be used as occupancy sensors. To this end, we have collected fine-grained electricity consumption data along with ground-truth occupancy information for 5 households during a period of about 8 months. Our results show that using common classification methods it is possible to achieve occupancy detection accuracies of more than 80 .
  @cite_24: In this paper we present a data-driven approach to modeling end user energy consumption in residential and commercial buildings. Our model is based upon a data set of monthly electricity and gas bills, collected by a utility over the course of several years, for approximately 6,500 buildings in Cambridge, MA. In addition, we use publicly available tax assessor records and geographical survey information to determine corresponding features for the buildings. Using both parametric and non-parametric learning methods, we learn models that predict distributions over energy usage based upon these features, and use these models to develop two end-user systems. For utilities or authorized institutions (those who may obtain access to the full data) we provide a system that visualizes energy consumption for each building in the city; this allows companies to quickly identify outliers (buildings which use much more energy than expected even after conditioning on the relevant predictors), for instance allowing them to target homes for potential retrofits or tiered pricing schemes. For other end users, we provide an interface for entering their own electricity and gas usage, along with basic information about their home, to determine how their consumption compares to that of similar buildings as predicted by our model. Merely allowing users to contextualize their consumption in this way, relating it to the consumption in similar buildings, can itself produce behavior changes to significantly reduce consumption.
  @cite_23: 
  @cite_2: The recent development of smart meters has allowed the analysis of household electricity consumption in real time. Predicting electricity consumption at such very low scales should help to increase the efficiency of distribution networks and energy pricing. However, this is by no means a trivial task since household-level consumption is much more irregular than at the transmission or distribution levels. In this work, we address the problem of improving consumption forecasting by using the statistical relations between consumption series. This is done both at the household and district scales (hundreds of houses), using various machine learning techniques, such as support vector machine for regression (SVR) and multilayer perceptron (MLP). First, we determine which algorithm is best adapted to each scale, then, we try to find leaders among the time series, to help short-term forecasting. We also improve the forecasting for district consumption by clustering houses according to their consumption profiles.
  @cite_25: The aim of this paper is to quantify the impact of disaggregated electric power measurements on the accuracy of household demand forecasts. Demand forecasting on the household level is regarded as an essential mechanism for matching distributed power generation and demand in smart power grids. We use state-of-the-art forecasting tools, in particular support vector machines and neural networks, to evaluate the use of disaggregated smart home sensor data for household-level demand forecasting. Our investigation leverages high resolution data from 3 private households collected over 30 days. Our key results are as follows: First, by comparing the accuracy of the machine learning based forecasts with a persistence forecast we show that advanced forecasting methods already yield better forecasts, even when carried out on aggregated household consumption data that could be obtained from smart meters (1-7 ). Second, our comparison of forecasts based on disaggregated data from smart home sensors with the persistence and smart meter benchmarks reveals further forecast improvements (4-33 ). Third, our sensitivity analysis with respect to the time resolution of data shows that more data only improves forecasting accuracy up to a certain point. Thus, having more sensors appears to be more valuable than increasing the time resolution of measurements.
summary: First studies have analyzed the potential and first prototypes of consumption forecasts for individual households (e.g. @cite_25 , @cite_26 ). However, most work on household consumption focuses on disaggregation of electricity consumption. Examples include @cite_23 , @cite_24 , @cite_2 , @cite_9 and @cite_29 . The authors of @cite_22 give an overview of the state-of-the-art in this area. In this paper, we benchmark state-of-the-art forecasting models for household consumption and also evaluate how the disaggregation of consumption data influences the prediction of household consumption.