Customer baseline load estimation for virtual power plants in demand response: An attention mechanism-based generative adversarial networks approach

The virtual power plant (VPP) that aggregates demand-side resources, is a new type of entity to participate in the electricity market and demand response (DR) program. Accurate customer baseline load (CBL) estimation is critical for DR implementation, especially the financial settlement in incentive-based DR. However, this is a challenging task as CBLs cannot be measured and are not equal to actual loads when DR events occur. Moreover, VPPs with different aggregation scales form heterogeneous electricity customers, which increases the difficulty of CBL estimation. In order to address this challenge, this paper proposes a novel deep learning-based CBL estimation method for varied types of electricity customers with different load levels. Specifically, we first transform the CBL estimation problem into a time-series missing data imputation issue, by regarding actual load sequences as CBL sequences with missing data, during DR periods. Then, we propose an attention mechanism-based neural network model to learn load patterns and characteristics of various CBLs, and also create the DR mask to avoid the disturbance of actual loads of DR periods on CBL’s normal pattern. Further, we develop the generative adversarial networks (GAN)-based data imputation framework to produce the corresponding complete CBL sequence according to the actual load sequence, and then recover the missing values accordingly. Finally, comprehensive case studies are conducted based on public datasets, and our proposed method outperforms all benchmarks, where the mean and standard deviation of its estimation percentage error are 5.85% and 1.74%, respectively. This validates the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed method.