Electric energy forecasting domain attracts researchers due to its key role in saving energy resources, where mainstream existing models are based on Gradient Boosting Regression, Artificial Neural Networks, Extreme Learning Machine and Support Vector Machine. These models encounter high-level of non-linearity between input data and output predictions and limited adoptability in real-world scenarios. Meanwhile, energy forecasting domain demands more robustness, higher prediction accuracy and generalization ability for real-world implementation. In this paper, we achieve the mentioned tasks by developing a hybrid sequential learning-based energy forecasting model that employs Convolution Neural Network and Gated Recurrent Units into a unified framework for accurate energy consumption prediction. The proposed framework has two major phases: (1) data refinement and (2) training, where the data refinement phase applies preprocessing strategies over raw data. In the training phase, CNN features are extracted from input dataset and fed in to GRU, that is selected as optimal and observed to have enhanced sequence learning abilities after extensive experiments. The proposed model is an effective alternative to the previous hybrid models in terms of computational complexity as well prediction accuracy, due to the representative features’ extraction potentials of CNNs and effectual gated structure of multi-layered GRU. The experimental evaluation over existing energy forecasting datasets reveal the better performance of our method in terms of preciseness and efficiency. The proposed method achieved the smallest error rate on individual Appliances Energy prediction and household electric power consumption datasets, when compared to other baseline models.

Due to industrialization and the rising demand for energy, global energy consumption has been rapidly increasing. Recent studies show that the biggest portion of energy is consumed in residential buildings, i.e., in European Union countries up to 40% of the total energy is consumed by households. Most residential buildings and industrial zones are equipped with smart sensors such as metering electric sensors, that are inadequately utilized for better energy management. In this paper, we develop a hybrid convolutional neural network (CNN) with an long short-term memory autoencoder (LSTM-AE) model for future energy prediction in residential and commercial buildings. The central focus of this research work is to utilize the smart meters’ data for energy forecasting in order to enable appropriate energy management in buildings. We performed extensive research using several deep learning-based forecasting models and proposed an optimal hybrid CNN with the LSTM-AE model. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to incorporate the aforementioned models under the umbrella of a unified framework with some utility preprocessing. Initially, the CNN model extracts features from the input data, which are then fed to the LSTM-encoder to generate encoded sequences. The encoded sequences are decoded by another following LSTM-decoder to advance it to the final dense layer for energy prediction. The experimental results using different evaluation metrics show that the proposed hybrid model works well. Also, it records the smallest value for mean square error (MSE), mean absolute error (MAE), root mean square error (RMSE) and mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) when compared to other state-of-the-art forecasting methods over the UCI residential building dataset. Furthermore, we conducted experiments on Korean commercial building data and the results indicate that our proposed hybrid model is a worthy contribution to energy forecasting.

Smart home applications are ubiquitous and have gained popularity due to the overwhelming use of Internet of Things (IoT)-based technology. The revolution in technologies has made homes more convenient, efficient, and even more secure. The need for advancement in smart home technology is necessary due to the scarcity of intelligent home applications that cater to several aspects of the home simultaneously, i.e., automation, security, safety, and reducing energy consumption using less bandwidth, computation, and cost. Our research work provides a solution to these problems by deploying a smart home automation system with the applications mentioned above over a resource-constrained Raspberry Pi (RPI) device. The RPI is used as a central controlling unit, which provides a cost-effective platform for interconnecting a variety of devices and various sensors in a home via the Internet. We propose a cost-effective integrated system for smart home based on IoT and Edge-Computing paradigm. The proposed system provides remote and automatic control to home appliances, ensuring security and safety. Additionally, the proposed solution uses the edge-computing paradigm to store sensitive data in a local cloud to preserve the customer’s privacy. Moreover, visual and scalar sensor-generated data are processed and held over edge device (RPI) to reduce bandwidth, computation, and storage cost. In the comparison with state-of-the-art solutions, the proposed system is 5% faster in detecting motion, and 5 ms and 4 ms in switching relay on and off, respectively. It is also 6% more efficient than the existing solutions with respect to energy consumption.

Video anomaly recognition in smart cities is an important computer vision task that plays a vital role in smart surveillance and public safety but is challenging due to its diverse, complex, and infrequent occurrence in real-time surveillance environments. Various deep learning models use significant amounts of training data without generalization abilities and with huge time complexity. To overcome these problems, in the current work, we present an efficient light-weight convolutional neural network (CNN)-based anomaly recognition framework that is functional in a surveillance environment with reduced time complexity. We extract spatial CNN features from a series of video frames and feed them to the proposed residual attention-based long short-term memory (LSTM) network, which can precisely recognize anomalous activity in surveillance videos. The representative CNN features with the residual blocks concept in LSTM for sequence learning prove to be effective for anomaly detection and recognition, validating our model’s effective usage in smart cities video surveillance. Extensive experiments on the real-world benchmark UCF-Crime dataset validate the effectiveness of the proposed model within complex surveillance environments and demonstrate that our proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models with a 1.77%, 0.76%, and 8.62% increase in accuracy on the UCF-Crime, UMN and Avenue datasets, respectively.

Smart grid technology based on renewable energy and energy storage systems are attracting considerable attention towards energy crises. Accurate and reliable model for electricity prediction is considered a key factor for a suitable energy management policy. Currently, electricity consumption is rapidly increasing due to the rise in human population and technology development. Therefore, in this study, we established a two-step methodology for residential building load prediction, which comprises two stages: in the first stage, the raw data of electricity consumption are refined for effective training; and the second step includes a hybrid model with the integration of convolutional neural network (CNN) and multilayer bidirectional gated recurrent unit (MB-GRU). The CNN layers are incorporated into the model as a feature extractor, while MB-GRU learns the sequences between electricity consumption data. The proposed model is evaluated using the root mean square error (RMSE), mean square error (MSE), and mean absolute error (MAE) metrics. Finally, our model is assessed over benchmark datasets that exhibited an extensive drop in the error rate in comparison to other techniques. The results indicated that the proposed model reduced errors over the individual household electricity consumption prediction (IHEPC) dataset (i.e., RMSE (5%), MSE (4%), and MAE (4%)), and for the appliances load prediction (AEP) dataset (i.e., RMSE (2%), and MAE (1%)).