A Multi-Timescale Data-Driven Approach to Enhance Distribution System Observability
For distribution system operators, this method improves observability by estimating unmetered customer loads, reducing the need for extensive smart meter deployment.
This paper proposes a data-driven method to estimate daily consumption patterns of customers without smart meters using monthly billing data, achieving enhanced distribution system observability. Tested on real utility data, the method combines spectral clustering, multi-timescale learning, and recursive Bayesian learning to infer hourly load profiles.
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: first, a spectral clustering (SC) 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 (MTSL) 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 (RBL) method and branch current state estimation (BCSE) 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.