Case-based reasoning using expert systems to determine electricity reduction in residential buildings

Case-based reasoning enables solving new problems using past experience, by reusing solutions for past problems. The simplicity of this technique has made it very popular in several domains. However, the use of this type of approach to support decisions in the power and energy domain is still rather unexplored, especially regarding the flexibility of consumption in buildings in response to recent environmental concerns and consequent governmental policies that envisage the increase of energy efficiency. In order to determine the amount of consumption reduction that should be applied in a building, this article proposes a methodology that adapts the past results of similar cases in order to achieve a decision for the new case. A clustering methodology is used to identify the most similar previous cases, and an expert system is developed to refine the final solution after the combination of the similar cases results. The proposed CBR methodology is evaluated using a set of real data from a residential building. Results prove the advantages of the proposed methodology, demonstrating its applicability to enhance house energy management systems by determining the amount of reduction that should be applied in each moment, thus allowing such systems to carry out the reduction through the different loads of the building