Sebastian Schmitt

Felix Lanfermann, Qiqi Liu, Yaochu Jin et al.

Implementing resource efficient energy management systems in facilities and buildings becomes increasingly important in the transformation to a sustainable society. However, selecting a suitable configuration based on multiple, typically conflicting objectives, such as cost, robustness with respect to uncertainty of grid operation, or renewable energy utilization, is a difficult multi-criteria decision making problem. The recently developed concept identification technique can facilitate a decision maker by sorting configuration options into semantically meaningful groups (concepts). In this process, the partitioning of the objectives and design parameters into different sets (called description spaces) is a very important step. In this study we focus on utilizing the concept identification technique for finding relevant and viable energy management configurations from a very large data set of Pareto-optimal solutions. The data set consists of 20000 realistic Pareto-optimal building energy management configurations generated by a many-objective evolutionary optimization of a high quality Digital Twin energy management simulator. We analyze how the choice of description spaces, i.e., the partitioning of the objectives and parameters, impacts the type of information that can be extracted. We show that the decision maker can introduce constraints and biases into that process to meet expectations and preferences. The iterative approach presented in this work allows for the generation of valuable insights into trade-offs between specific objectives, and constitutes a powerful and flexible tool to support the decision making process when designing large and complex energy management systems.

Felix Lanfermann, Sebastian Schmitt

Finding meaningful concepts in engineering application datasets which allow for a sensible grouping of designs is very helpful in many contexts. It allows for determining different groups of designs with similar properties and provides useful knowledge in the engineering decision making process. Also, it opens the route for further refinements of specific design candidates which exhibit certain characteristic features. In this work, an approach to define meaningful and consistent concepts in an existing engineering dataset is presented. The designs in the dataset are characterized by a multitude of features such as design parameters, geometrical properties or performance values of the design for various boundary conditions. In the proposed approach the complete feature set is partitioned into several subsets called description spaces. The definition of the concepts respects this partitioning which leads to several desired properties of the identified concepts. This cannot be achieved with state-of-the-art clustering or concept identification approaches. A novel concept quality measure is proposed, which provides an objective value for a given definition of concepts in a dataset. The usefulness of the measure is demonstrated by considering a realistic engineering dataset consisting of about 2500 airfoil profiles, for which the performance values (lift and drag) for three different operating conditions were obtained by a computational fluid dynamics simulation. A numerical optimization procedure is employed, which maximizes the concept quality measure and finds meaningful concepts for different setups of the description spaces, while also incorporating user preference. It is demonstrated how these concepts can be used to select archetypal representatives of the dataset which exhibit characteristic features of each concept.

Christian Internò, Andrea Castellani, Sebastian Schmitt et al.

Industrial Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring (NILM) is limited by the scarcity of high-quality datasets and the complex variability of industrial energy consumption patterns. To address data scarcity and privacy issues, we introduce the Synthetic Industrial Dataset for Energy Disaggregation (SIDED), an open-source dataset generated using Digital Twin simulations. SIDED includes three types of industrial facilities across three different geographic locations, capturing diverse appliance behaviors, weather conditions, and load profiles. We also propose the Appliance-Modulated Data Augmentation (AMDA) method, a computationally efficient technique that enhances NILM model generalization by intelligently scaling appliance power contributions based on their relative impact. We show in experiments that NILM models trained with AMDA-augmented data significantly improve the disaggregation of energy consumption of complex industrial appliances like combined heat and power systems. Specifically, in our out-of-sample scenarios, models trained with AMDA achieved a Normalized Disaggregation Error of 0.093, outperforming models trained without data augmentation (0.451) and those trained with random data augmentation (0.290). Data distribution analyses confirm that AMDA effectively aligns training and test data distributions, enhancing model generalization.

Jens Engel, Andrea Castellani, Patricia Wollstadt et al.

We present a large real-world dataset obtained from monitoring a smart company facility over the course of six years, from 2018 to 2023. The dataset includes energy consumption data from various facility areas and components, energy production data from a photovoltaic system and a combined heat and power plant, operational data from heating and cooling systems, and weather data from an on-site weather station. The measurement sensors installed throughout the facility are organized in a hierarchical metering structure with multiple sub-metering levels, which is reflected in the dataset. The dataset contains measurement data from 72 energy meters, 9 heat meters and a weather station. Both raw and processed data at different processing levels, including labeled issues, is available. In this paper, we describe the data acquisition and post-processing employed to create the dataset. The dataset enables the application of a wide range of methods in the domain of energy management, including optimization, modeling, and machine learning to optimize building operations and reduce costs and carbon emissions.

Patricia Wollstadt, Sebastian Schmitt

An important issue during an engineering design process is to develop an understanding which design parameters have the most influence on the performance. Especially in the context of optimization approaches this knowledge is crucial in order to realize an efficient design process and achieve high-performing results. Information theory provides powerful tools to investigate these relationships because measures are model-free and thus also capture non-linear relationships, while requiring only minimal assumptions on the input data. We therefore propose to use recently introduced information-theoretic methods and estimation algorithms to find the most influential input parameters in optimization results. The proposed methods are in particular able to account for interactions between parameters, which are often neglected but may lead to redundant or synergistic contributions of multiple parameters. We demonstrate the application of these methods on optimization data from aerospace engineering, where we first identify the most relevant optimization parameters using a recently introduced information-theoretic feature-selection algorithm that accounts for interactions between parameters. Second, we use the novel partial information decomposition (PID) framework that allows to quantify redundant and synergistic contributions between selected parameters with respect to the optimization outcome to identify parameter interactions. We thus demonstrate the power of novel information-theoretic approaches in identifying relevant parameters in optimization runs and highlight how these methods avoid the selection of redundant parameters, while detecting interactions that result in synergistic contributions of multiple parameters.

Xilu Wang, Yaochu Jin, Sebastian Schmitt et al.

Most existing multiobjetive evolutionary algorithms (MOEAs) implicitly assume that each objective function can be evaluated within the same period of time. Typically. this is untenable in many real-world optimization scenarios where evaluation of different objectives involves different computer simulations or physical experiments with distinct time complexity. To address this issue, a transfer learning scheme based on surrogate-assisted evolutionary algorithms (SAEAs) is proposed, in which a co-surrogate is adopted to model the functional relationship between the fast and slow objective functions and a transferable instance selection method is introduced to acquire useful knowledge from the search process of the fast objective. Our experimental results on DTLZ and UF test suites demonstrate that the proposed algorithm is competitive for solving bi-objective optimization where objectives have non-uniform evaluation times.

Andrea Castellani, Sebastian Schmitt, Barbara Hammer

Detecting drifts in data is essential for machine learning applications, as changes in the statistics of processed data typically has a profound influence on the performance of trained models. Most of the available drift detection methods are either supervised and require access to the true labels during inference time, or they are completely unsupervised and aim for changes in distributions without taking label information into account. We propose a novel task-sensitive semi-supervised drift detection scheme, which utilizes label information while training the initial model, but takes into account that supervised label information is no longer available when using the model during inference. It utilizes a constrained low-dimensional embedding representation of the input data. This way, it is best suited for the classification task. It is able to detect real drift, where the drift affects the classification performance, while it properly ignores virtual drift, where the classification performance is not affected by the drift. In the proposed framework, the actual method to detect a change in the statistics of incoming data samples can be chosen freely. Experimental evaluation on nine benchmarks datasets, with different types of drift, demonstrates that the proposed framework can reliably detect drifts, and outperforms state-of-the-art unsupervised drift detection approaches.

Patricia Wollstadt, Sebastian Schmitt, Michael Wibral

Selecting a minimal feature set that is maximally informative about a target variable is a central task in machine learning and statistics. Information theory provides a powerful framework for formulating feature selection algorithms -- yet, a rigorous, information-theoretic definition of feature relevancy, which accounts for feature interactions such as redundant and synergistic contributions, is still missing. We argue that this lack is inherent to classical information theory which does not provide measures to decompose the information a set of variables provides about a target into unique, redundant, and synergistic contributions. Such a decomposition has been introduced only recently by the partial information decomposition (PID) framework. Using PID, we clarify why feature selection is a conceptually difficult problem when approached using information theory and provide a novel definition of feature relevancy and redundancy in PID terms. From this definition, we show that the conditional mutual information (CMI) maximizes relevancy while minimizing redundancy and propose an iterative, CMI-based algorithm for practical feature selection. We demonstrate the power of our CMI-based algorithm in comparison to the unconditional mutual information on benchmark examples and provide corresponding PID estimates to highlight how PID allows to quantify information contribution of features and their interactions in feature-selection problems.

Andrea Castellani, Sebastian Schmitt, Barbara Hammer

In complex industrial settings, it is common practice to monitor the operation of machines in order to detect undesired states, adjust maintenance schedules, optimize system performance or collect usage statistics of individual machines. In this work, we focus on estimating the power output of a Combined Heat and Power (CHP) machine of a medium-sized company facility by analyzing the total facility power consumption. We formulate the problem as a time-series classification problem where the class label represents the CHP power output. As the facility is fully instrumented and sensor measurements from the CHP are available, we generate the training labels in an automated fashion from the CHP sensor readings. However, sensor failures result in mislabeled training data samples which are hard to detect and remove from the dataset. Therefore, we propose a novel multi-task deep learning approach that jointly trains a classifier and an autoencoder with a shared embedding representation. The proposed approach targets to gradually correct the mislabelled data samples during training in a self-supervised fashion, without any prior assumption on the amount of label noise. We benchmark our approach on several time-series classification datasets and find it to be comparable and sometimes better than state-of-the-art methods. On the real-world use-case of predicting the CHP power output, we thoroughly evaluate the architectural design choices and show that the final architecture considerably increases the robustness of the learning process and consistently beats other recent state-of-the-art algorithms in the presence of unstructured as well as structured label noise.

Theodoros Georgiou, Sebastian Schmitt, Thomas Bäck et al.

Convolutional neural network training can suffer from diverse issues like exploding or vanishing gradients, scaling-based weight space symmetry and covariant-shift. In order to address these issues, researchers develop weight regularization methods and activation normalization methods. In this work we propose a weight soft-regularization method based on the Oblique manifold. The proposed method uses a loss function which pushes each weight vector to have a norm close to one, i.e. the weight matrix is smoothly steered toward the so-called Oblique manifold. We evaluate our method on the very popular CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100 and ImageNet 2012 datasets using two state-of-the-art architectures, namely the ResNet and wide-ResNet. Our method introduces negligible computational overhead and the results show that it is competitive to the state-of-the-art and in some cases superior to it. Additionally, the results are less sensitive to hyperparameter settings such as batch size and regularization factor.

Theodoros Georgiou, Sebastian Schmitt, Thomas Bäck et al.

Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulations are a very important tool for many industrial applications, such as aerodynamic optimization of engineering designs like cars shapes, airplanes parts etc. The output of such simulations, in particular the calculated flow fields, are usually very complex and hard to interpret for realistic three-dimensional real-world applications, especially if time-dependent simulations are investigated. Automated data analysis methods are warranted but a non-trivial obstacle is given by the very large dimensionality of the data. A flow field typically consists of six measurement values for each point of the computational grid in 3D space and time (velocity vector values, turbulent kinetic energy, pressure and viscosity). In this paper we address the task of extracting meaningful results in an automated manner from such high dimensional data sets. We propose deep learning methods which are capable of processing such data and which can be trained to solve relevant tasks on simulation data, i.e. predicting drag and lift forces applied on an airfoil. We also propose an adaptation of the classical hand crafted features known from computer vision to address the same problem and compare a large variety of descriptors and detectors. Finally, we compile a large dataset of 2D simulations of the flow field around airfoils which contains 16000 flow fields with which we tested and compared approaches. Our results show that the deep learning-based methods, as well as hand crafted feature based approaches, are well-capable to accurately describe the content of the CFD simulation output on the proposed dataset.

Andrea Castellani, Sebastian Schmitt, Stefano Squartini

The continuously growing amount of monitored data in the Industry 4.0 context requires strong and reliable anomaly detection techniques. The advancement of Digital Twin technologies allows for realistic simulations of complex machinery, therefore, it is ideally suited to generate synthetic datasets for the use in anomaly detection approaches when compared to actual measurement data. In this paper, we present novel weakly-supervised approaches to anomaly detection for industrial settings. The approaches make use of a Digital Twin to generate a training dataset which simulates the normal operation of the machinery, along with a small set of labeled anomalous measurement from the real machinery. In particular, we introduce a clustering-based approach, called Cluster Centers (CC), and a neural architecture based on the Siamese Autoencoders (SAE), which are tailored for weakly-supervised settings with very few labeled data samples. The performance of the proposed methods is compared against various state-of-the-art anomaly detection algorithms on an application to a real-world dataset from a facility monitoring system, by using a multitude of performance measures. Also, the influence of hyper-parameters related to feature extraction and network architecture is investigated. We find that the proposed SAE based solutions outperform state-of-the-art anomaly detection approaches very robustly for many different hyper-parameter settings on all performance measures.

Jakub Kmec, Sebastian Schmitt

Aerodynamic shape optimization has established itself as a valuable tool in the engineering design process to achieve highly efficient results. A central aspect for such approaches is the mapping from the design parameters which encode the geometry of the shape to be improved to the quality criteria which describe its performance. The choices to be made in the setup of the optimization process strongly influence this mapping and thus are expected to have a profound influence on the achievable result. In this work we explore the influence of such choices on the effects on the shape optimization of a turbofan rotor blade as it can be realized within an aircraft engine design process. The blade quality is assessed by realistic three dimensional computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations. We investigate the outcomes of several optimization runs which differ in various configuration options, such as optimization algorithm, initialization, number of degrees of freedom for the parametrization. For all such variations, we generally find that the achievable improvement of the blade quality is comparable for most settings and thus rather insensitive to the details of the setup. On the other hand, even supposedly minor changes in the settings, such as using a different random seed for the initialization of the optimizer algorithm, lead to very different shapes. Optimized shapes which show comparable performance usually differ quite strongly in their geometries over the complete blade. Our analyses indicate that the fitness landscape for such a realistic turbofan rotor blade optimization is highly multi-modal with many local optima, where very different shapes show similar performance.