The billing process of an energy distributor in Brazil is connected to reading energy consumption logistics. An efficient, balanced and capacity enabled process has benefits with cost reducing and quality perception of the service provided. In capacitated clustering, the elements are associated with weights for construction of groups with limited capacities. This paper presents an approach to the capacitated clustering problem, applied to the consumer unit measurement groups organization in Brazil's energy distributors companies. The process of creating those measurement groups, in general, is carried out manually by expert analysts. The purpose of this problem modality is to create partitions that minimize the internal dispersion of the associated group. In this work, the RCMeans method, which is based on the K-Means technique applied to data groupings with the inclusion of the capacity constraint for the group definition, is presented. The obtained results show a comparison between the current situation and the result with the proposed method, under the cohesion analysis, separation, number of groups, silhouette index, and consumer units measurement mean time of the groups.
To mitigate financial loss and follow the recommended sanitary measures due to the COVID-19 pandemic, self-reading, a method in which a consumer reads and reports his own energy consumption, has been presented as an efficient alternative for power companies. In such context, this work presents a solution for self-reading via chatbot in chatting applications. This solution is under development as part of a research and development (R&D) project. It is integrated with a method based on image processing that automatically reads the energy consumption and recognizes the identification code of a meter for validation purposes. Furthermore, all processes utilize cognitive services from the IBM Watson platform to recognize intentions in the dialog with the consumers. The dataset used to validate the proposed method for self-reading contains examples of analogical and digital meters used by Equatorial Energy group. Preliminary results presented accuracies of 77.20% and 84.30%, respectively, for the recognition of complete reading sequences and identification codes in digital meters and accuracies of 89% and 95.20% in the context of analogical meters. Considering both meter types, the method obtains an accuracy per digit of 97%. The proposed method was also evaluated with UFPR-AMR public dataset and achieves a result comparable to the state of the art.
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