Residential Household Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring via Smart Event-based Optimization

Home energy management requires accurate information about the appliances' consumption pattern. This information can help consumers save energy, control their usage by shifting their usage to off-peak hours and reduce their electricity costs. Non-intrusive load monitoring (NILM) in which the power consumption profile of appliances are extracted from the aggregated signal of a household, provides this information. For the NILM problem, machine learning approaches as the training-based solutions require large training datasets for an accurate disaggregation and the optimization-based approaches employs prior information about the characteristics of appliances. This paper proposes a novel event-based optimization algorithm. In its first stage, the prior information about appliances is extracted from the events of the consumption profiles of appliances by means of clustering. Then, a new event-based down-sampling method and transition filtering are designed for decreasing the computation time of optimization. At the last stage of the proposed algorithm, post-processing considering ON duration of appliances and varying states are proposed to increase the accuracy of the power profile reconstruction. The proposed approach was successfully tested for the low-frequency dataset of a house from the REDD. Numerical results show the advantages of the proposed algorithm, marked improvement over classification-based NILM considering small training dataset and its applicability in disaggregating the power consumption measured by the smart meter.