Autoencoders for Anomaly Detection in Electricity and District Heating Consumption: A Case Study in School Buildings in Sweden

Real-time anomaly detection in real-time energy consumption helps identify the technical and infrastructure issues and events that result in significant energy waste and provides the end users feedback to address the issues, which reduces drift operation costs and saves energy in the building. This study proposes deep learning reconstruction models to detect anomalies in daily energy consumption data for nine school buildings. We evaluated the performance of three proposed models, stacked RNN-LSTM autoencoder, CNN-LSTM autoencoder, and LSTM Variational Autoencoder (VAE), to learn the features of normal consumption in an unsupervised manner and detect anomalies based on reconstruction error. We used Exponential Moving Average (EMA) and static threshold to detect local and global anomalies. The experimental results demonstrate that the local CNN-LSTM autoencoder performs better than the local Stacked Autoencoder(AE), with RMSE values ranging between 8-13% for electricity and 11-19% for district heating compared to 12-17% and 15-34% resulting from AE model, respectively. Local LSTM-Variational Autoencoder (VAE) outperformed both methods, with RMSE 4-6% for electricity and 5-7% for district heating. LSTM-VAE trained model on grouped training datasets of schools with similar energy consumption and building profiles has improved the local model by lowering RMSE values to 2-3% for electricity and 3-4% in district heating.