NILM techniques for intelligent home energy management and ambient assisted living: a review

The ongoing deployment of smart meters and different commercial devices has made electricity disaggregation feasible in buildings and households, based on a single measure of the current and, sometimes, of the voltage. Energy disaggregation is intended to separate the total power consumption into specific appliance loads, which can be achieved by applying Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring (NILM) techniques with a minimum invasion of privacy. NILM techniques are becoming more and more widespread in recent years, as a consequence of the interest companies and consumers have in efficient energy consumption and management. This work presents a detailed review of NILM methods, focusing particularly on recent proposals and their applications, particularly in the areas of Home Energy Management Systems (HEMS) and Ambient Assisted Living (AAL), where the ability to determine the on/off status of certain devices can provide key information for making further decisions. As well as complementing previous reviews on the NILM field and providing a discussion of the applications of NILM in HEMS and AAL, this paper provides guidelines for future research in these topics.Agência financiadora: Programa Operacional Portugal 2020 and Programa Operacional Regional do Algarve 01/SAICT/2018/39578 Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia through IDMEC, under LAETA: SFRH/BSAB/142998/2018 SFRH/BSAB/142997/2018 UID/EMS/50022/2019 Junta de Comunidades de Castilla-La-Mancha, Spain: SBPLY/17/180501/000392 Spanish Ministry of Economy, Industry and Competitiveness (SOC-PLC project): TEC2015-64835-C3-2-R MINECO/FEDERinfo:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Statistical and Electrical Features Evaluation for Electrical Appliances Energy Disaggregation

In this paper we evaluate several well-known and widely used machine learning algorithms for regression in the energy disaggregation task. Specifically, the Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring approach was considered and the K-Nearest-Neighbours, Support Vector Machines, Deep Neural Networks and Random Forest algorithms were evaluated across five datasets using seven different sets of statistical and electrical features. The experimental results demonstrated the importance of selecting both appropriate features and regression algorithms. Analysis on device level showed that linear devices can be disaggregated using statistical features, while for non-linear devices the use of electrical features significantly improves the disaggregation accuracy, as non-linear appliances have non-sinusoidal current draw and thus cannot be well parametrized only by their active power consumption. The best performance in terms of energy disaggregation accuracy was achieved by the Random Forest regression algorithm.Peer reviewedFinal Published versio

Incorporating appliance usage patterns for non-intrusive load monitoring and load forecasting

This paper proposes a novel Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring (NILM) method which incorporates appliance usage patterns (AUPs) to improve performance of active load identi- fication and forecasting. In the first stage, the AUPs of a given residence were learnt using a spectral decomposition based standard NILM algorithm. Then, learnt AUPs were utilized to bias the priori probabilities of the appliances through a specifically constructed fuzzy system. The AUPs contain likelihood measures for each appliance to be active at the present instant based on the recent activity/inactivity of appliances and the time of day. Hence, the priori probabilities determined through the AUPs increase the active load identification accuracy of the NILM algorithm. The proposed method was successfully tested for two standard databases containing real household measurements in USA and Germany. The proposed method demonstrates an improvement in active load estimation when applied to the aforementioned databases as the proposed method augments the smart meter readings with the behavioral trends obtained from AUPs. Furthermore, a residential power consumption forecasting mechanism, which can predict the total active power demand of an aggregated set of houses, five minutes ahead of real time, was successfully formulated and implemented utilizing the proposed AUP based technique

Deep learning applications in non-intrusive load monitoring

Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring (NILM) is a technique for inferring the power consumption of each appliance within a home from one central meter, aiding in energy conservation. In this thesis I present several Deep Learning solutions for NILM, starting with two preliminary works – A proof of concept project for multisensory NILM on a Raspberry Pi; and a fully developed NILM solution named WaveNILM. Despite their success, both methods struggled to generalize outside their training data, a common problem in NILM. To improve generalization, I designed a framework for synthesizing truly novel appliance level power signatures based on generative adversarial networks (GAN) – the main project of this thesis. This generator, named PowerGAN, is trained using a variety of GAN techniques. I present a comparison of PowerGAN to other data synthesis work in the context of NILM and demonstrate that PowerGAN is able to create truly synthetic, realistic, diverse, appliance power signatures

Neural NILM: Deep Neural Networks Applied to Energy Disaggregation

Energy disaggregation estimates appliance-by-appliance electricity consumption from a single meter that measures the whole home's electricity demand. Recently, deep neural networks have driven remarkable improvements in classification performance in neighbouring machine learning fields such as image classification and automatic speech recognition. In this paper, we adapt three deep neural network architectures to energy disaggregation: 1) a form of recurrent neural network called `long short-term memory' (LSTM); 2) denoising autoencoders; and 3) a network which regresses the start time, end time and average power demand of each appliance activation. We use seven metrics to test the performance of these algorithms on real aggregate power data from five appliances. Tests are performed against a house not seen during training and against houses seen during training. We find that all three neural nets achieve better F1 scores (averaged over all five appliances) than either combinatorial optimisation or factorial hidden Markov models and that our neural net algorithms generalise well to an unseen house.Comment: To appear in ACM BuildSys'15, November 4--5, 2015, Seou