A New Binary Encoding Method for Energy Consumption Patterns Quantification

Extracting users’ energy consumption patterns (ECPs) from smart meter data is an important work for retailers. The existing literature usually describe these patterns by clustering the daily load curves (DLCs), but lack a clear and quantified representation to explain what the exact schema of a user is. Therefore, this article proposes a new binary encoding method for ECPs quantification. Specifically, first, both time and value intervals are divided for dimensionality reduction based on the similarity of adjacent timestamp loads. Then, a binary aggregate approximation (BAX) method is proposed to encode each DLC into a BAX word, and the BAX words of users are merged to obtain the schemas with a three-element alphabet. Finally, based on the schemas, the stability scores of users’ patterns are quantified and are used to select target users for demand response (DR) measures. Case studies on a real dataset with 5566 users show that each target user averagely contributes to 0.172% of peak reduction, while each unselected user only contributes to 0.026%. Furthermore, to obtain target schemas and to find new users in future DR measures, a
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-means symbolic algorithm is designed to cluster BAX words of target users. The proposed encoding method and the findings can provide guidance of finding typical target users for DR measures.