Prediction of Energy Consumption for Variable Customer Portfolios Including Aleatoric Uncertainty Estimation

Using hourly energy consumption data recorded by smart meters, retailers can estimate the day-ahead energy consumption of their customer portfolio. Deep neural networks are especially suited for this task as a huge amount of historical consumption data is available from smart meter recordings to be used for model training. Probabilistic layers further enable the estimation of the uncertainty of the consumption forecasts. Here, we propose a method to calculate hourly day-ahead energy consumption forecasts which include an estimation of the aleatoric uncertainty. To consider the statistical properties of energy consumption values, the aleatoric uncertainty is modeled using lognormal distributions whose parameters are calculated by deep neural networks. As a result, predictions of the hourly day-ahead energy consumption of single customers are represented by random variables drawn from lognormal distributions obtained as output from the neural network. We further demonstrate, how these random variables corresponding to single customers can be aggregated to probabilistic forecasts of customer portfolios of arbitrary composition.

Machine Learning-Based Unbalance Detection of a Rotating Shaft Using Vibration Data

Fault detection at rotating machinery with the help of vibration sensors offers the possibility to detect damage to machines at an early stage and to prevent production downtimes by taking appropriate measures. The analysis of the vibration data using methods of machine learning promises a significant reduction in the associated analysis effort and a further improvement in diagnostic accuracy. Here we publish a dataset which is used as a basis for the development and evaluation of algorithms for unbalance detection. For this purpose, unbalances of various sizes were attached to a rotating shaft using a 3D-printed holder. In a speed range from approx. 630 RPM to 2330 RPM, three sensors were used to record vibrations on the rotating shaft at a sampling rate of 4096 values per second. A development and an evaluation dataset are available for each unbalance strength. Using the dataset recorded in this way, fully connected and convolutional neural networks, Hidden Markov Models and Random Forest classifications on the basis of automatically extracted time series features were tested. With a prediction accuracy of 98.6 % on the evaluation dataset, the best result could be achieved with a fully-connected neural network that receives the scaled FFT-transformed vibration data as input.