Uncertainty Analysis and Application on Smart Homes and Smart Grids: Big Data Approaches

  • Heng Shi

Student thesis: Doctoral ThesisPhD

Abstract

Methods for uncertainty quantification (UQ) and mitigation in the electrical power system are very basic, Monte Carlo (MC) method and its meta methods are generally deployed in most applications, due to its simplicity and easy to be generalised. They are adequate for a traditional power system when the load is predictable, and generation is controllable. However, the large penetration of low carbon technologies, such as solar panels, electric vehicles, and energy storage, has necessitated the needs for more comprehensive approaches to uncertainty as these technologies introduce new sources of uncertainties with larger volume and diverse characteristics, understanding source and consequences of uncertainty becomes highly complex issues. Traditional methods assume that for a given system it has a unique uncertainty characteristic, hence deal with the uncertainty of the system as a single component in applications. However, this view is no longer applicable in the new context as it neglects the important underlying information associated with individual uncertainty components. Therefore, this thesis aims at: i) systematically developing UQ methodologies to identify, discriminate, and quantify different uncertainty components (forward UQ), and critically to model and trace the associated sources independently (inverse UQ) to deliver new uncertainty information, such as, how uncertainty components generated from its sources, how uncertainty components correlate with each other and how uncertainty components propagate through system aggregation; ii) applying the new uncertainty information to further improve a range of fundamental power system applications from Load Forecasting (LF) to Energy Management System (EMS).In the EMS application, the proposed forward UQ methods enable the development of a decentralised system that is able to tap into the new uncertainty information concerning the correlations between load pattern across individual households, the characteristics of uncertainty components and their propagation through aggregation. The decentralised EMS was able to achieve peak and uncertainty reduction by 18% and 45% accordingly at the grid level. In the LF application, this thesis developed inverse UQ through a deep learning model to directly build the connection between uncertainty components and its corresponding sources. For Load Forecasting on expectation (point LF) and probability (probabilistic LF) and witnessed 20%/12% performance improvement compared to the state-of-the-art, such as Support Vector Regression (SVR), Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA), and Multiple Linear Quantile Regression (MLQR).
Date of Award27 Jul 2018
Original languageEnglish
Awarding Institution
  • University of Bath
SupervisorFurong Li (Supervisor)

Keywords

  • Big Data
  • low voltage network
  • Energy Management
  • load forecasting
  • deep learning
  • Bayesian modelling
  • UNCERTAINTY
  • uncertainty modelling

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