Clients segmentation according to their domestic energy consumption by the use of self-organizing maps

The CENIT research project GAD (Demand Active Management), partly supported by the Spanish government, has as its objective the demand side management (DSM) of domestic end-users, smoothing the peaks of energy demand, therefore enhancing the conditions of transport and distribution networks and the quality of energy delivery and service. One of the objectives in the development of the project is the classification of users according to their patterns of daily energy load profiles. Based on daily hour measures from a sample of residential users, a self-organizing map (SOM) has been trained to classify users according to a specific number of resulting patterns of daily load profiles, attached to a number of indices that define the users' energy consumption. The so-trained SOM classifier allows the characterization of future users based on their load profiles, thus estimating their energy consumption habits and potentially manageable energy.