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

GREEND: An Energy Consumption Dataset of Households in Italy and Austria

Home energy management systems can be used to monitor and optimize consumption and local production from renewable energy. To assess solutions before their deployment, researchers and designers of those systems demand for energy consumption datasets. In this paper, we present the GREEND dataset, containing detailed power usage information obtained through a measurement campaign in households in Austria and Italy. We provide a description of consumption scenarios and discuss design choices for the sensing infrastructure. Finally, we benchmark the dataset with state-of-the-art techniques in load disaggregation, occupancy detection and appliance usage mining

Emerging Smart Meters in Electrical Distribution Systems: Opportunities and Challenges

High penetration of variable and non-programmable distributed generation has brought new challenges to the power system operation and is highlighting the need of a smarter grid. One of the key requirements in this regard is developing and deploying smart metering systems in distribution networks. In this paper we present the actual situation in the Italian distribution networks and we discuss the opportunities and challenges of applying new metering systems and introducing a flexible, multi-utility, multi-service metering architecture. Some off-the-shelf or prototype smart meters, selected to be tested in an ongoing European project, named FLEXMETER, are presented

Transformation of Conventional Houses to Smart Homes by Adopting Demand Response Program in Smart Grid

In an ever-growing state of electricity demand due to population growth as well as modernization of societies, it has compelled us to look for many options to cope with the situations. However, for a balanced electrical power demand and supply, it is necessary to respond requirement at any time without any interruption with the strategy of demand response programs (DRP) to the users. In order to promote smart usage of electrical power, smart grid networks are gradually transforming conventional grids in many places. As a part of smart grid, conventional houses may be transformed to smart house by simply implementing some intelligent controller with interfaces like smart plugs to the conventional electrical appliances. This chapter elaborates a new strategy of home energy management system (HEMS) in a smart grid environment to transform any ordinary premises to smart house to be energy efficient by simply rescheduling operation time

A Survey of Smart Grid Systems on Electric Power Distribution Network and Its Impact on Reliability

This paper presents an excerpt of a more comprehensive survey of smart grid systems on electric power distribution networks and its impact on reliability. The survey was carried out as part of the feasibility study in Nigeria to determine its enhance-ability on the smartness of a conventional (traditional) distribution network. A smart grid is not a single technology but multiplex technologies in which the combination of different areas of engineering, communication and energy management systems are done. Consequently, a comprehensive review of various approaches and their impact on reliability of the network is presented. Furthermore, this paper introduces the smart grid technology and its features, reliability impacts and emerging issues and challenges that arise from the smart grid system applications. The benefit of this comprehensive survey is to provide a reference point for educational advancement on the recently published articles in the areas of smart grid systems on electric power distribution network as well as to stimulate further research interest

Load Demand Disaggregation Based on Simple Load Signature and User's Feedback

Abstract A detailed and on-line knowledge of the electrical load demand by the users is a critical issue for an effective and responsive deployment of home/building energy management. An approach based on the application of Non Intrusive Appliance Load Monitoring (NIALM) techniques copes with the goal of disaggregating composite loads; but to get a high level of precision, NIALM algorithms need a complete load signature and complex optimization algorithms to find the right combination of single loads that fits the real electrical measurements. On the other hand, it is practically impossible to get the detailed signature of all appliances inside a house/building and sophisticated optimization algorithm are not suitable for on-line applications. To overcome such problems a straightforward NIALM algorithm is proposed, it is based on both a simple load signature, rated active and reactive power and a heuristic disaggregation algorithm. Of course, it is expected that on real applications, this approach cannot reach very high performances; this is the reason why an active involvement of users is considered. The users' feedback aims to: correct the load signatures, reduce the error of disaggregation algorithm and increase the active participation of users in saving energy politics. The NIALM algorithm has been accurately tested numerically using as input load curves generated randomly but under given constraints. In this way, the causes of inefficiency of the proposed approach are quantitatively analyzed both separately and in different combinations. Finally, the increase of the efficiency of the NIALM algorithm due to the application of different feedback actions is evaluated and discussed