Clustering-Based Self-Imputation of Unlabeled Fault Data in a Fleet of Photovoltaic Generation Systems

Sunme Park, Soyeong Park, Myungsun Kim and Euiseok Hwang
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Sunme Park: School of Mechanical Engineering, Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology, 123 Cheomdangwagi-ro, Buk-gu, Gwangju 61005, Korea
Soyeong Park: School of Mechanical Engineering, Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology, 123 Cheomdangwagi-ro, Buk-gu, Gwangju 61005, Korea
Myungsun Kim: School of Mechanical Engineering, Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology, 123 Cheomdangwagi-ro, Buk-gu, Gwangju 61005, Korea
Euiseok Hwang: School of Mechanical Engineering, Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology, 123 Cheomdangwagi-ro, Buk-gu, Gwangju 61005, Korea

Energies, 2020, vol. 13, issue 3, 1-16

Abstract: This work proposes a fault detection and imputation scheme for a fleet of small-scale photovoltaic (PV) systems, where the captured data includes unlabeled faults. On-site meteorological information, such as solar irradiance, is helpful for monitoring PV systems. However, collecting this type of weather data at every station is not feasible for a fleet owing to the limitation of installation costs. In this study, to monitor a PV fleet efficiently, neighboring PV generation profiles were utilized for fault detection and imputation, as well as solar irradiance. For fault detection from unlabeled raw PV data, K-means clustering was employed to detect abnormal patterns based on customized input features, which were extracted from the fleet PVs and weather data. When a profile was determined to have an abnormal pattern, imputation for the corresponding data was implemented using the subset of neighboring PV data clustered as normal. For evaluation, the effectiveness of neighboring PV information was investigated using the actual rooftop PV power generation data measured at several locations in the Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology (GIST) campus. The results indicate that neighboring PV profiles improve the fault detection capability and the imputation accuracy. For fault detection, clustering-based schemes provided error rates of 0.0126 and 0.0223, respectively, with and without neighboring PV data, whereas the conventional prediction-based approach showed an error rate of 0.0753. For imputation, estimation accuracy was significantly improved by leveraging the labels of fault detection in the proposed scheme, as much as 18.32% reduction in normalized root mean square error (NRMSE) compared with the conventional scheme without fault consideration.

Keywords: PV fleet; clustering-based PV fault detection; unsupervised learning; self-imputation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q Q0 Q4 Q40 Q41 Q42 Q43 Q47 Q48 Q49 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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