Ensemble Classification Model for EV Identification from Smart Meter Recordings

Electric vehicles (EVs) often consume large amounts of energy, and uncoordinated charging of many EVs may lead to grid overload, adversely impacting other customers. Electricity distributors require full visibility on the EV distribution to better manage operation planning of their distribution grid. However, they often have incomplete knowledge of EV presence in their network. Identifying EV customers (charging at home) using smart meter data is a nontrivial task for the grid network and energy scheduling. The difficulties include recognizing charging patterns, balancing the number of EV and non-EV customers during modeling, and building an efficient classification model. In this manuscript, we propose a periodic pattern recognition method to extract useful EV charging patterns. Real world smart meter data sets are unbalanced with few EVs and majority of energy customers are those without EVs. We improve Kmedoids evaluated by dynamic time warping (DTW) to obtain the representative non-EV training samples so that balanced samples over EV and non-EV customers can be obtained. We develop an ensemble classification model (ECM) by taking advantages of multiple classifiers, in which the optimization consists of obtaining the optimal subset of periodic patterns and the optimal parameters in each classifier and the optimal weights for combining classifiers. The superiority of the proposed ECM is demonstrated in comparison to several baseline models.