mREAL-GAN: Generating Multiple Residential Electrical Appliance Load Profiles with Inter-Dependencies using a Generative Adversarial Network

Abstract

In this paper, we introduce mREAL-GAN, a generative adversarial network (GAN) for the parallel generation of multiple residential electrical appliance load (mREAL) profiles. mREAL-GAN is intended for use in community-scale low-voltage network analysis, and represents a departure from previous methods for this purpose, which break the generation of appliance load profiles into several steps and largely model each appliance independently. Instead, mREAL-GAN models appliance load profiles in an end-to-end manner, and generates multiple appliance load profiles in parallel in a way that captures inter-dependencies. We show that mREAL-GAN generates load profiles for individual appliance-types with greater fidelity than a popular example of previous methods, and demonstrate its ability to capture inter-dependencies between appliances.