Home electrical signal disaggregation for non-intrusive load monitoring (NILM) systems

Electrical load disaggregation for end-use recognition in the smart home has become an area of study of its own right. The most well-known examples are energy monitoring, health care applications, in-home activity modeling, and home automation. Real-time energy-use analysis for whole-home approaches needs to understand where and when the electrical loads are spent. Studies have shown that individual loads can be detected (and disaggregated) from sampling the power at one single point (e.g. the electric service entrance for the house) using a non-intrusive load monitoring (NILM) approach. In this paper, we focus on the feature extraction and pattern recognition tasks for non-intrusive residential electrical consumption traces. In particular, we develop an algorithm capable of determining the step-changes in signals that occur whenever a device is turned on or off, and which allows for the definition of a unique signature (ID) for each device. This algorithm makes use of features extracted from active and reactive powers and power factor. The classification task is carried out by Support Vector Machines and 5-Nearest Neighbors methods. The results illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed signature for distinguishing the different loads. (C) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.