Accurate Power Consumption Predictor and One-Class Electricity Theft Detector for Smart Grid “Change-and-Transmit” Advanced Metering Infrastructure

The advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) of the smart grid plays a critical role in energy management and billing by enabling the periodic transmission of consumers’ power consumption readings. To optimize data collection efficiency, AMI employs a “change and transmit” (CAT) approach. This approach ensures that readings are only transmitted when there is enough change in consumption, thereby reducing data traffic. Despite the benefits of this approach, it faces security challenges where malicious consumers can manipulate their readings to launch cyberattacks for electricity theft, allowing them to illegally reduce their bills. While this challenge has been addressed for supervised learning CAT settings, it remains insufficiently addressed in unsupervised learning settings. Moreover, due to the distortion introduced in the power consumption readings due to using the CAT approach, the accurate prediction of future consumption for energy management is a challenge. In this paper, we propose a two-stage approach to predict future readings and detect electricity theft in the smart grid while optimizing data collection using the CAT approach. For the first stage, we developed a predictor that is trained exclusively on benign CAT power consumption readings, and the output of the predictor is the actual readings. To enhance the prediction accuracy, we propose a cluster-based predictor that groups consumers into clusters with similar consumption patterns, and a dedicated predictor is trained for each cluster. For the second stage, we trained an autoencoder and a one-class support vector machine (SVM) on the benign reconstruction errors of the predictor to classify instances of electricity theft. We conducted comprehensive experiments to assess the effectiveness of our proposed approach. The experimental results indicate that the prediction error is very small and the accuracy of detection of the electricity theft attacks is high.