DeviceScope: An Interactive App to Detect and Localize Appliance
Patterns in Electricity Consumption Time Series
In recent years, electricity suppliers have installed millions of smart
meters worldwide to improve the management of the smart grid system. These
meters collect a large amount of electrical consumption data to produce
valuable information to help consumers reduce their electricity footprint.
However, having non-expert users (e.g., consumers or sales advisors) understand
these data and derive usage patterns for different appliances has become a
significant challenge for electricity suppliers because these data record the
aggregated behavior of all appliances. At the same time, ground-truth labels
(which could train appliance detection and localization models) are expensive
to collect and extremely scarce in practice. This paper introduces DeviceScope,
an interactive tool designed to facilitate understanding smart meter data by
detecting and localizing individual appliance patterns within a given time
period. Our system is based on CamAL (Class Activation Map-based Appliance
Localization), a novel weakly supervised approach for appliance localization
that only requires the knowledge of the existence of an appliance in a
household to be trained. This paper appeared in ICDE 2025.
From Transformers to Large Language Models: A systematic review of AI
applications in the energy sector towards Agentic Digital Twins
Artificial intelligence (AI) has long promised to improve energy management
in smart grids by enhancing situational awareness and supporting more effective
decision-making. While traditional machine learning has demonstrated notable
results in forecasting and optimization, it often struggles with
generalization, situational awareness, and heterogeneous data integration.
Recent advances in foundation models such as Transformer architecture and Large
Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated improved capabilities in modelling
complex temporal and contextual relationships, as well as in multi-modal data
fusion which is essential for most AI applications in the energy sector. In
this review we synthesize the rapid expanding field of AI applications in the
energy domain focusing on Transformers and LLMs. We examine the architectural
foundations, domain-specific adaptations and practical implementations of
transformer models across various forecasting and grid management tasks. We
then explore the emerging role of LLMs in the field: adaptation and fine tuning
for the energy sector, the type of tasks they are suited for, and the new
challenges they introduce. Along the way, we highlight practical
implementations, innovations, and areas where the research frontier is rapidly
expanding. These recent developments reviewed underscore a broader trend:
Generative AI (GenAI) is beginning to augment decision-making not only in
high-level planning but also in day-to-day operations, from forecasting and
grid balancing to workforce training and asset onboarding. Building on these
developments, we introduce the concept of the Agentic Digital Twin, a
next-generation model that integrates LLMs to bring autonomy, proactivity, and
social interaction into digital twin-based energy management systems.
Universal Differential Equations for Scientific Machine Learning of
Node-Wise Battery Dynamics in Smart Grids
Universal Differential Equations (UDEs), which blend neural networks with
physical differential equations, have emerged as a powerful framework for
scientific machine learning (SciML), enabling data-efficient, interpretable,
and physically consistent modeling. In the context of smart grid systems,
modeling node-wise battery dynamics remains a challenge due to the
stochasticity of solar input and variability in household load profiles.
Traditional approaches often struggle with generalization and fail to capture
unmodeled residual dynamics. This work proposes a UDE-based approach to learn
node-specific battery evolution by embedding a neural residual into a
physically inspired battery ODE. Synthetic yet realistic solar generation and
load demand data are used to simulate battery dynamics over time. The neural
component learns to model unobserved or stochastic corrections arising from
heterogeneity in node demand and environmental conditions. Comprehensive
experiments reveal that the trained UDE aligns closely with ground truth
battery trajectories, exhibits smooth convergence behavior, and maintains
stability in long-term forecasts. These findings affirm the viability of
UDE-based SciML approaches for battery modeling in decentralized energy
networks and suggest broader implications for real-time control and
optimization in renewable-integrated smart grids.
Variational Autoencoder-Based Approach to Latent Feature Analysis on
Efficient Representation of Power Load Monitoring Data
With the development of smart grids, High-Dimensional and Incomplete (HDI)
Power Load Monitoring (PLM) data challenges the performance of Power Load
Forecasting (PLF) models. In this paper, we propose a potential
characterization model VAE-LF based on Variational Autoencoder (VAE) for
efficiently representing and complementing PLM missing data. VAE-LF learns a
low-dimensional latent representation of the data using an Encoder-Decoder
structure by splitting the HDI PLM data into vectors and feeding them
sequentially into the VAE-LF model, and generates the complementary data.
Experiments on the UK-DALE dataset show that VAE-LF outperforms other benchmark
models in both 5% and 10% sparsity test cases, with significantly lower RMSE
and MAE, and especially outperforms on low sparsity ratio data. The method
provides an efficient data-completion solution for electric load management in
smart grids.
Benchmarking Pre-Trained Time Series Models for Electricity Price Forecasting
Accurate electricity price forecasting (EPF) is crucial for effective
decision-making in power trading on the spot market. While recent advances in
generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) and pre-trained large language
models (LLMs) have inspired the development of numerous time series foundation
models (TSFMs) for time series forecasting, their effectiveness in EPF remains
uncertain. To address this gap, we benchmark several state-of-the-art
pretrained models--Chronos-Bolt, Chronos-T5, TimesFM, Moirai, Time-MoE, and
TimeGPT--against established statistical and machine learning (ML) methods for
EPF. Using 2024 day-ahead auction (DAA) electricity prices from Germany,
France, the Netherlands, Austria, and Belgium, we generate daily forecasts with
a one-day horizon. Chronos-Bolt and Time-MoE emerge as the strongest among the
TSFMs, performing on par with traditional models. However, the biseasonal MSTL
model, which captures daily and weekly seasonality, stands out for its
consistent performance across countries and evaluation metrics, with no TSFM
statistically outperforming it.
Federated Learning for Smart Grid: A Survey on Applications and Potential Vulnerabilities
The Smart Grid (SG) is a critical energy infrastructure that collects real-time electricity usage data to forecast future energy demands using information and communication technologies (ICT). Due to growing concerns about data security and privacy in SGs, federated learning (FL) has emerged as a promising training framework. FL offers a balance between privacy, efficiency, and accuracy in SGs by enabling collaborative model training without sharing private data from IoT devices. In this survey, we thoroughly review recent advancements in designing FL-based SG systems across three stages: generation, transmission and distribution, and consumption. Additionally, we explore potential vulnerabilities that may arise when implementing FL in these stages. Furthermore, we discuss the gap between state-of-the-art (SOTA) FL research and its practical applications in SGs, and we propose future research directions. Unlike traditional surveys addressing security issues in centralized machine learning methods for SG systems, this survey is the first to specifically examine the applications and security concerns unique to FL-based SG systems. We also introduce FedGridShield, an open-source framework featuring implementations of SOTA attack and defense methods. Our aim is to inspire further research into applications and improvements in the robustness of FL-based SG systems.
Real-Time Cascade Mitigation in Power Systems Using Influence Graph
Improved by Reinforcement Learning
Despite high reliability, modern power systems with growing renewable
penetration face an increasing risk of cascading outages. Real-time cascade
mitigation requires fast, complex operational decisions under uncertainty. In
this work, we extend the influence graph into a Markov decision process model
(MDP) for real-time mitigation of cascading outages in power transmission
systems, accounting for uncertainties in generation, load, and initial
contingencies. The MDP includes a do-nothing action to allow for conservative
decision-making and is solved using reinforcement learning. We present a policy
gradient learning algorithm initialized with a policy corresponding to the
unmitigated case and designed to handle invalid actions. The proposed learning
method converges faster than the conventional algorithm. Through careful reward
design, we learn a policy that takes conservative actions without deteriorating
system conditions. The model is validated on the IEEE 14-bus and IEEE 118-bus
systems. The results show that proactive line disconnections can effectively
reduce cascading risk, and certain lines consistently emerge as critical in
mitigating cascade propagation.