On the accuracy of appliance identification based on distributed load metering data

Dynamic load management, i.e., allowing electricity utilities to remotely turn electric appliances in households on or off, represents a key element of the smart grid. Appliances should however only be disconnected from mains when no negative side effects, e.g., loss of data or thawing food, are incurred thereby. This motivates the use of appliance identification techniques, which determine the type of an attached appliance based on the continuous sampling of its power consumption. While various implementations based on different sampling resolutions have been presented in existing literature, the achievable classification accuracies have rarely been analyzed. We address this shortcoming and evaluate the accuracy of appliance identification based on the characteristic features of traces collected during the 24 hours of a day. We evaluate our algorithm using more than 1,000 traces of different electrical appliances' power consumptions. The results show that our approach can identify most of the appliances at high accuracy.