How machine learning and AI can prevent electricity and cable theft in SA

Every year, municipalities across South Africa lose millions of Rands from electricity theft. My work as an electrical engineer at Aurecon has led me to think deeply about coming up with ways to not only help solve this problem but consider possible preventative measures that could be put into place. Municipalities generate an enormous amount of data related to electricity distribution and consumption. When combined with real-time data analysis and machine learning algorithms, this information can be used to pick up on electricity theft at any node in the grid. As part of my Research interests, I started to create an algorithm that uses machine learning and artificial neural intelligence to detect electricity theft as well as cable theft, together with one of the Junior Electrical Engineers Tendai Matiza.