Clustering of Complementary Electricity Consumers Based on Their Usage Patterns

In the electricity market, the real-time balance of electricity generation and consumption is a main task. In view of this, power providers usually sign contracts with their critical consumers (i.e., usually large-scale industrial companies) for managing their capacity demands. On the other hand, aggregators group commercial and residential consumers, and integrate their demands to negotiate with power providers. With a proper grouping of numerous electricity consumers, aggregators help to ensure stable electric supply, and reduce the burden of managing many consumers. In this work, we thus propose a novel data clustering approach to group complementary consumers based on their usage patterns (i.e., daily electricity consumption curves.) Furthermore, we incorporate the technique of discrete wavelet transform to speed up the clustering process. Specifically, approximations reconstructed from only a few wavelet coefficients may precisely capture the shape of original usage patterns. Experimental results based on a real dataset show that our approach is promising in practical applications.