Load Hiding of Household's Power Demand

With the development and introduction of smart metering, the energy information for costumers will change from infrequent manual meter readings to fine-grained energy consumption data. On the one hand these fine-grained measurements will lead to an improvement in costumers' energy habits, but on the other hand the fined-grained data produces information about a household and also households' inhabitants, which are the basis for many future privacy issues. To ensure household privacy and smart meter information owned by the household inhabitants, load hiding techniques were introduced to obfuscate the load demand visible at the household energy meter. In this work, a state-of-the-art battery-based load hiding (BLH) technique, which uses a controllable battery to disguise the power consumption and a novel load hiding technique called load-based load hiding (LLH) are presented. An LLH system uses an controllable household appliance to obfuscate the household's power demand. We evaluate and compare both load hiding techniques on real household data and show that both techniques can strengthen household privacy but only LLH can increase appliance level privacy

Integration of Legacy Appliances into Home Energy Management Systems

The progressive installation of renewable energy sources requires the coordination of energy consuming devices. At consumer level, this coordination can be done by a home energy management system (HEMS). Interoperability issues need to be solved among smart appliances as well as between smart and non-smart, i.e., legacy devices. We expect current standardization efforts to soon provide technologies to design smart appliances in order to cope with the current interoperability issues. Nevertheless, common electrical devices affect energy consumption significantly and therefore deserve consideration within energy management applications. This paper discusses the integration of smart and legacy devices into a generic system architecture and, subsequently, elaborates the requirements and components which are necessary to realize such an architecture including an application of load detection for the identification of running loads and their integration into existing HEM systems. We assess the feasibility of such an approach with a case study based on a measurement campaign on real households. We show how the information of detected appliances can be extracted in order to create device profiles allowing for their integration and management within a HEMS

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

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

Characterisation of the Acto-MyoA motor complex in Toxoplasma gondii

In apicomplexan parasites, the machinery required for gliding motility is located between the plasma membrane and the Inner Membrane Complex (IMC). This type of motility depends on the regulated polymerisation and depolymerisation of actin and a multi-subunit complex, known as the Myosin A motor complex. This complex consists of the myosin heavy chain A (MyoA), the myosin light chain 1 (MLC1), the essential light chain 1 (ELC1) and three gliding-associated proteins (GAP40, GAP45 and GAP50). Gliding motility is thought to be essential for host cell egress and linked to active, parasite driven penetration of the host cell. Many components of this complex are extensively studied using either the ddFKBP system or the tetracycline-inducible knockdown system (Tet-system). Strikingly, while depletion of myoA has no impact on IMC formation, overexpression of the tail domain of MyoA results in a severe IMC biogenesis phenotype. In order to investigate this issue, conditional knockout (KO) mutants of the interacting partners of MyoA-tail were generated using the conditional site-specific DiCre recombination system. Indeed, GAP40 and GAP50 were identified as being essential for parasite replication and having a crucial role during IMC biogenesis. This is the first evidence showing that components of the MyoA motor complex fulfil essential functions during IMC formation and thus are not exclusively important for gliding motility dependant processes. Several components of the MyoA motor complex were characterised using the Tet-system and showed a complete block in gliding motility, but not in host cell invasion. While it is possible that leaky expression of the gene in the knockdown mutants is responsible for this uncoupling of gliding motility and invasion, it remains feasible that different mechanisms are involved in these two processes. In order to shed light on this issue, conditional KOs for the Acto-MyoA motor complex were generated in this study and their functions during gliding dependent processes thoroughly analysed. Intriguingly, while depletion of individual components of this complex caused a severe block in host cell egress, gliding motility and host cell penetration were decreased, but not blocked, demonstrating an important, but not essential role of the Acto-MyoA motor complex during these processes. Altogether, this study raises questions of our current view of what drives gliding motility and invasion and supports the argument for critical revision of the linear motor model