CCIS Seminar: Non-Technical Loss Detection for Metered Customers in Power Utility using Support Vector Machines

Dear all,

The Centre for Computing and Intelligent Systems (CCIS) will be organizing a talk by Mr. Yap Keem Siah, Senior Lecturer, Department of Electronics & Communication Engineering, College of Engineering, Universiti Tenaga Nasional (UNITEN). The details of the talk are as the following:

Date: 24 June 2009 (Wednesday)
Time: 10 am – 11 am
Venue: PD206, FICT, UTAR.
Title: Non-Technical Loss Detection for Metered Customers in Power Utility using Support Vector Machines
Abstract:
Electricity consumer dishonesty is a problem faced by all power utilities. Finding efficient measurements for detecting fraudulent electricity consumption has been an active research area in recent years. This presentation proposed a new approach towards non-technical loss (NTL) detection in power utilities using an artificial intelligence based technique, i. e., support vector machine (SVM). The main motivation of this study is to assist power utilities to reduce its NTLs in the distribution sector due to abnormalities and fraud activities, i.e., electricity theft. The fraud detection model developed in this research study pre-selects suspected customers to be inspected onsite fraud based on irregularities in consumption behavior. This approach provides a method of data mining, which involves feature extraction from historical customer consumption data. This SVM based approach uses customer load profile information and additional attributes to expose abnormal behavior that is known to be highly correlated with NTL activities. The result yields customer classes which are used to shortlist potential suspects for onsite inspection based on significant behavior that emerges due to fraud activities. Model testing is performed using historical kWh consumption data for three towns and the feedback from the onsite inspection indicates that the proposed method is more effective compared to the current actions taken by them. With the implementation of this new fraud detection system detection hit-rate will increase from 3% to 60%.

*Light refreshment will be served.

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regards,
Yong Haur