Grant: Collaborative Research and Development Grants

As part of the Green Button initiative, utilities in Canada and the United States are making attempts to make smart meter data more accessible to customers by enabling them to download their energy usage data securely and share it with third parties. These Big Data presents opportunities to analyze energy consumption patterns, identify savings opportunities, and conserve energy. The main objective of this research project is to devise a comprehensive software framework for monitoring energy consumption and analyzing data provided by smart meters along with the development of energy-related software applications. To achieve these goals, this project will explore and advance Big Data analytics in the context of energy management. The framework will be based on Service-Oriented Architecture and will provide data analytics capabilities as services. Moreover, because traditional data analytics methods are facing challenges in addressing Big Data requirements, traditional machine learning and data mining approaches will be adapted for work with Big Data in distributed and/or cloud environments. The results from this project will directly benefit the industrial partner London Hydro by providing a generic, flexible, and expandable framework for energy management. The outcome of this project will provide energy consumers with the ability to understand their energy consumption better, identify opportunities for energy and cost savings, and estimate their future energy consumption and cost. It is also expected that this project will contribute to advancements in Big Data analytics research which can benefit other domains. Furthermore, the HQP involved in this project will gain valuable experience in working with Big Data in the smart environment sector, which will make them valuable to any Internet of Things or Big Data job-related market.