Electricity Market Customer Segmentation Based on DBSCAN and k-Means : —A Case on Yunnan Electricity Market

Customer segmentation is a proven and efficient method of differential management that has been widely used in various fields. By providing different types of customers with specific services to meet their heterogeneous needs, companies achieve profit growth and other objectives. Determined by the unique market background, especially the settlement mechanism, the trading behavior evaluation in use and the customer segmentation in plan together constitute the differential management system in Yunnan Electricity Market. They help Kunming Power Exchange to mine the information covered in participants’ data, so that the exchange can be aware of their situation and better maintain the stable development of the market. A segmentation algorithm based on density-based spatial clustering of applications with noise (DBSCAN) and k-means method is designed to satisfy the requirement in Yunnan Electricity Market. A case analysis using the proposed algorithm is carried out, and the result shows that the segmentation of retailers using their actual operational data is effective and the mechanism can be considered reliable.