IEEE-CIS Technical Challenge on Energy Prediction from Smart Meter Data

Data description and submission requirements

IMPORTANT: Data has been updated on September 7th, 2020 after finding a bug in the timestamps.

The goal of this competition is to predict the monthly electricity consumption for 3248 households in a coming year (January to December). You are provided with historical half-hourly energy readings for the 3248 smart meters. To simulate a realistic use case, we take the 1st of January of a given year as the day we want to make predictions. Thus, different smart-meters will have available a range of months’ worth of consumption, ranging from only last month (i.e. December) to the entire last year (January to December), acknowledging that customers may have joined at different times during the previous year. For example, we may have a few customers for which we only have data from last December, and we aim to predict January to December of the coming year, whilst for others, we may have the entire January-to-December time series. We would like to see how well we can predict the coming year depending on the amount of data that is available. 

For each meter_id in the provided dataset, you must predict the consumption in the following 12 months in kWh. In addition, you are requested to submit a draft description of your methodology (up to 1000 words). Note that If you are working in a team you should indicate this clearly in your final submission. Only one submission for each team will be considered during the shortlisting.

Full description of the data and submission requirements can be downloaded here. 

Evaluation 

Our partner E.ON is interested in predicting with the least amount of data as possible a good estimate of the total year consumption for reasons of payment adequacy. In addition to that, an accurate monthly consumption prediction is also very valuable for Energy Trading teams, who need to be able to predict with some accuracy how much electricity to buy on the energy market. We will use the relative absolute error for monthly and yearly predictions. See the Leaderboard and all submissions at the bottom of the page or alternatively here.

Details about the evaluation can be found here. 

Note that the Leader Board table is updated every 5 minutes. In case you submit a wrongly formatted submission, you will be listed at the top of the submissions' table with an empty row.

At the end of the competition, and looking at the aspects explained above, the Technical and Scientific Committees will shortlist the top 5 submissions. Shortlisted authors will be asked to provide a final description of their methodology (4 pages in IEEE format, more details will be provided at the time).

Final submissions will be carefully assessed according to the following criteria:

-        Performance in different scenarios, including annual and monthly predictions, as well as predictions with limited historical data of the user.

-        Novelty of the proposed approach and appropriate use of Computational Intelligence techniques if any (not required!). The Scientific committee will be asked to rank the shortlisted independently and this will be used to compute a score.

 Note that use of data other than the one provided is not allowed. If you do so, we will not consider your submission.

Timeline

-        August 15th, 2020 – Competition start.

-        November 15th, 2020 – Final submission deadline.

-        November 18th, 2020 – Shortlisting announcement.  

-        November 25th, 2020 – Deadline final description report.

-        December 1st, 2020 – Shortlisted solution presentations at the 2020 IEEE Symposium Series on Computational Intelligence (SSCI). The conference will be held virtually and registration for the 5 shortlisted submissions will be covered.

-        December 4th, 2020 – Awards ceremony

All deadlines are at 11:59 PM UTC on the corresponding day unless otherwise noted. The competition organisers reserve the right to update the contest timeline if they deem it necessary.

Prizes

Awarded by the Committee based on the criteria mentioned above.

-        1st Prize: $7,000

-        2nd Prize: $5,000

-        3rd Prize: $3,000

-     4th and 5th Prizes: $1,000

All teams, regardless of place, are also strongly encouraged and invited to publish a manuscript of their solution (and open source their code, if possible).

Results

After the review process from the Scientific Committee, the Technical Challenge Committee of the 2nd Technical Challenge of the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society is delighted to announce the final ranking and awards of this exciting competition on energy prediction from Smart Meter Data!

This final ranking looks as follows:

- 1st position: Wenlong Wu - $7000

- 2nd position: Steffen Limmer - $5000

- 3rd position: Jesus Lago - $3000

Runners-up:

- Kasun Bandara, Hansika Hewamalage and Rakshitha Godahewa - $1000

- Sven Rebhan and Nils Einecke - $1000

- Alexander Dokumentov and Fedor Dokumentov - $1000

Technical Challenge Committee

•       Isaac Triguero (Chair, Associate Professor, University of Nottingham)

•       Catherine Huang (Principal Engineer, McAfee LLC)

•       Hussein Abbass (Professor, University of New South Wales)

•       Juan Bernabé-Moreno (Chief Data Officer E.ON SE)

•       Luis Magdalena (CIS VP TA, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid)

•       Manuel Roveri (Professor, Politecnico di Milano)

Scientific Committee

• Robert Eigenmann, E.ON
• Steffan Birr, E.ON
• Alberto Fernandez, University of Granada
• Ricardo Cerri, Federal University of São Carlos
• Daniel Peralta, Ghent University
• Jaume Bacardit, University of Newcastle
• Alejandro Rosales, CIMAT, Mexico.
• Mikel Galar, Public University of Navarre
• Natalia Rodriguez, ENSTA Paris
• Alberto Cano, Virginia Commonwealth University

Acknowledgements

E.ON SE provided the dataset for this competition. E.ON is an international, privately owned energy supplier based in Essen, Germany. With a clear focus on two strong core businesses E.ON aim to become the partner of choice for energy and customer solutions. E.ON provide solutions for the new energy world.

The Chairs of the IEEE-CIS Technical Challenge Committee would like to extend our thanks to:

-      Dr Robert Eigenmann, Nicholas Harbour and Dr Stefan Birr from the E.ON team.

-        Selvi Ergen, KTP associate, funded by E.ON and Innovate UK under KTP project 11094.

-        Heda Song, PhD student and Researcher at the University of Nottingham.