Now showing 1 - 2 of 2
  • Publication
    Creating and Characterising Electricity Load Profiles of Residential Buildings
    Intelligent planning, control and forecasting of electricity usage has become a vitally important element of the modern conception of the energy grid. Electricity smart-meters permit the sequential measurement of electricity usage at an aggregate level within a dwelling at regular time intervals. Electricity distributors or suppliers are interested in making general decisions that apply to large groups of customers, making it necessary to determine an appropriate electricity usage behaviour-based clustering of these data to determine appropriate aggregate load profiles. We perform a clustering of time series data associated with 3670 residential smart meters from an Irish customer behaviour trial and attempt to establish the relationship between the characteristics of each cluster based upon responses provided in an accompanying survey. Our analysis provides interesting insights into general electricity usage behaviours of residential consumers and the salient characteristics that affect those behaviours. Our characterisation of the usage profiles at a fine-granularity level and the resultant insights have the potential to improve the decisions made by distribution and supply companies, policy makers and other stakeholders, allowing them, for example, to optimise pricing, electricity usage, network investment strategies and to plan policies to best affect social behavior.
      462Scopus© Citations 5
  • Publication
    Learning to Sparsify Travelling Salesman Problem Instances
    In order to deal with the high development time of exact and approximation algorithms for NP-hard combinatorial optimisation problems and the high running time of exact solvers, deep learning techniques have been used in recent years as an end-to-end approach to find solutions. However, there are issues of representation, generalisation, complex architectures, interpretability of models for mathematical analysis etc. using deep learning techniques. As a compromise, machine learning can be used to improve the run time performance of exact algorithms in a matheuristics framework. In this paper, we use a pruning heuristic leveraging machine learning as a pre-processing step followed by an exact Integer Programming approach. We apply this approach to sparsify instances of the classical travelling salesman problem. Our approach learns which edges in the underlying graph are unlikely to belong to an optimal solution and removes them, thus sparsifying the graph and significantly reducing the number of decision variables. We use carefully selected features derived from linear programming relaxation, cutting planes exploration, minimum-weight spanning tree heuristics and various other local and statistical analysis of the graph. Our learning approach requires very little training data and is amenable to mathematical analysis. We demonstrate that our approach can reliably prune a large fraction of the variables in TSP instances from TSPLIB/MATILDA (>85%) while preserving most of the optimal tour edges. Our approach can successfully prune problem instances even if they lie outside the training distribution, resulting in small optimality gaps between the pruned and original problems in most cases. Using our learning technique, we discover novel heuristics for sparsifying TSP instances, that may be of independent interest for variants of the vehicle routing problem.
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