Electrical load pattern shape clustering using ant colony optimization

Abstract

Electrical Load Pattern Shape (LPS) clustering of customers is an important part of the tariff formulation process. Nevertheless, the patterns describing the energy consumption of a customer have some characteristics (e.g., a high number of features corresponding to time series reflecting the measurements of a typical day) that make their analysis different from other pattern recognition applications. In this paper, we propose a clustering algorithm based on ant colony optimization (ACO) to solve the LPS clustering problem. We use four well-known clustering metrics (i.e., CDI, SI, DEV and CONN), showing that the selection of a clustering quality metric plays an important role in the LPS clustering problem. Also, we compare our LPS-ACO algorithm with traditional algorithms, such as k-means and single-linkage, and a stateof- the-art Electrical Pattern Ant Colony Clustering (EPACC) algorithm designed for this task. Our results show that LPS-ACO performs remarkably well using any of the metrics presented here.