SmartEle: Smart Electricity Dashboard for Detecting Consumption Patterns: A Case Study at a University Campus

Abstract

To achieve Sustainable Development Goal 7 (SDG7), it is essential to detect the spatiotemporal patterns of electricity consumption, particularly the spatiotemporal heterogeneity of consumers. This is also crucial for rational energy planning and management. However, studies investigating heterogeneous users are lacking. Moreover, existing works focuses on mathematic models to identify and predict electricity consumption. Additionally, owing to the complex non-linear interrelationships, interactive visualizations are more effective in detecting patterns. Therefore, by combining geospatial dashboard knowledge and interactive visualization technology, a Smart Electricity dashboard (SmartEle) was designed and developed to interactively visualize big electrical data and interrelated factors. A university campus as the study area. The SmartEle system addressed three challenges. First, it permitted user group-oriented monitoring of electricity consumption patterns, which has seldom been considered in existing studies. Second, a visualization-driven data mining model was proposed, and an interactive visualization dashboard was designed to facilitate the perception of electricity usage patterns at different granularities and from different perspectives. Finally, to deal with the non-linear features of electricity consumption, the ATT-LSTM machine learning model to support multivariate collaborative predicting was proposed to improve the accuracy of short-term electricity consumption predictions. The results demonstrated that the SmartEle system is usable for electricity planning and management.