Energy Disaggregation via Adaptive Filtering

The energy disaggregation problem is recovering device level power consumption signals from the aggregate power consumption signal for a building. We show in this paper how the disaggregation problem can be reformulated as an adaptive filtering problem. This gives both a novel disaggregation algorithm and a better theoretical understanding for disaggregation. In particular, we show how the disaggregation problem can be solved online using a filter bank and discuss its optimality.Comment: Submitted to 51st Annual Allerton Conference on Communication, Control, and Computin

Blind Identification via Lifting

Blind system identification is known to be an ill-posed problem and without further assumptions, no unique solution is at hand. In this contribution, we are concerned with the task of identifying an ARX model from only output measurements. We phrase this as a constrained rank minimization problem and present a relaxed convex formulation to approximate its solution. To make the problem well posed we assume that the sought input lies in some known linear subspace.Comment: Submitted to the IFAC World Congress 2014. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1303.671

Social Game for Building Energy Efficiency: Utility Learning, Simulation, and Analysis

We describe a social game that we designed for encouraging energy efficient behavior amongst building occupants with the aim of reducing overall energy consumption in the building. Occupants vote for their desired lighting level and win points which are used in a lottery based on how far their vote is from the maximum setting. We assume that the occupants are utility maximizers and that their utility functions capture the tradeoff between winning points and their comfort level. We model the occupants as non-cooperative agents in a continuous game and we characterize their play using the Nash equilibrium concept. Using occupant voting data, we parameterize their utility functions and use a convex optimization problem to estimate the parameters. We simulate the game defined by the estimated utility functions and show that the estimated model for occupant behavior is a good predictor of their actual behavior. In addition, we show that due to the social game, there is a significant reduction in energy consumption