A Semi-Intrusive Load Monitoring Approach for Demand Response Applications

Appliance-Load Monitoring (ALM) is essential for several demand-response (DR) programs. The techniques used for this purpose are broadly classified into two types: 1) Intrusive Load Monitoring (ILM), and 2) Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring (NILM). This paper proposes a semi-intrusive load monitoring (SILM) technique to exploit the bests of both. The method does not use any disaggregation algorithm; instead, it's an instrumentation approach to monitor the power consumption of appliances. First, it groups all appliances of a residential house in some clusters and then monitors those, in near real-time, using only one sensing-unit per cluster. A lab-scale testbed is developed to verify the claims of the proposed method. Test results demonstrate the monitoring and controlling capability and prove the cost-effectiveness of the technique. Raspberry Pi is used as the programming platform along with Python programming language.