Hierarchical Classification of Load Profiles Based on Their Characteristic Attributes in Frequency Domain

Load profile classification is very important in load forecast, planning and management. Although customers are generally grouped by utilities into residential, commercial classes and respective subclasses, there is a lack of systematic framework that can be used to characterize different classes with signatures that are both human-readable and machine-readable. The work presented in this paper attempts to formulate the theoretical framework for customer classification using the annual load profiles. This paper demonstrates how to extract characteristic attributes in frequency domain (CAFD) and use these CAFDs to formulate a hierarchy of load profiles that can be used as the systematic framework for customer load classification. As signatures for customer classes and subclasses, the CAFDs are obtained by using a data mining method called CART (classification and regression tree). The paper presents a load profile classification test to establish the efficacy of the proposed approach which is significant improvement over current practices that provide mostly qualitative labeling.