Modern Machine Learning Solution for Electricity Consumption Management in Smart Buildings

Abstract

Effective management of electricity consumption (EC) in smart buildings (SBs) is crucial for optimizing operational efficiency, cost savings, and ensuring sustainable resource utilization. Accurate EC prediction enables proactive decision-making, ensuring that resources are allocated efficiently to meet actual demand levels while maintaining occupant comfort. Population growth, building expansion, and technology usage swiftly escalate electricity demand, thus necessitating economical EC management strategies and assist consumers to better understand and strategically plan their EC. To address these challenges, this article proposes a novel approach based on a hybrid prediction model combining temporal convolutional networks (TCNs) and gated recurrent units (GRU). This approach capitalizes on the strengths of both TCN and GRU. TCN is adept at efficiently identifying diverse patterns, particularly within the complex working environments of SBs, by effectively capturing high- and low-frequency information. Subsequently, GRU is leveraged to address the long-term dependencies within the data, enhancing the accuracy of EC prediction. In this article, the results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed hybrid model, outperforming competitive methods with an impressive mean absolute error score. This underscores the potential of this approach to improve energy management practices significantly within SB environments, ultimately enhancing both operational efficiency and occupant satisfaction. © 1973-2011 IEEE.