No Arabic abstract
In the recent years, there has been an increasing academic and industrial interest for analyzing the electrical consumption of commercial buildings. Whilst having similarities with the Non Intrusive Load Monitoring (NILM) tasks for residential buildings, the nature of the signals that are collected from large commercial buildings introduces additional difficulties to the NILM research causing existing NILM approaches to fail. On the other hand, the amount of publicly available datasets collected from commercial buildings is very limited, which makes the NILM research even more challenging for this type of large buildings. In this study, we aim at addressing these issues. We first present an extensive statistical analysis of both commercial and residential measurements from public and private datasets and show important differences. Secondly, we develop an algorithm for generating synthetic current waveforms. We then demonstrate using real measurement and quantitative metrics that both our device model and our simulations are realistic and can be used to evaluate NILM algorithms. Finally, to encourage research on commercial buildings we release a synthesized dataset.
Energy disaggregation, also known as non-intrusive load monitoring (NILM), challenges the problem of separating the whole-home electricity usage into appliance-specific individual consumptions, which is a typical application of data analysis. {NILM aims to help households understand how the energy is used and consequently tell them how to effectively manage the energy, thus allowing energy efficiency which is considered as one of the twin pillars of sustainable energy policy (i.e., energy efficiency and renewable energy).} Although NILM is unidentifiable, it is widely believed that the NILM problem can be addressed by data science. Most of the existing approaches address the energy disaggregation problem by conventional techniques such as sparse coding, non-negative matrix factorization, and hidden Markov model. Recent advances reveal that deep neural networks (DNNs) can get favorable performance for NILM since DNNs can inherently learn the discriminative signatures of the different appliances. In this paper, we propose a novel method named adversarial energy disaggregation (AED) based on DNNs. We introduce the idea of adversarial learning into NILM, which is new for the energy disaggregation task. Our method trains a generator and multiple discriminators via an adversarial fashion. The proposed method not only learns shard representations for different appliances, but captures the specific multimode structures of each appliance. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets verify that our method can achieve new state-of-the-art performance.
A convolutional sequence to sequence non-intrusive load monitoring model is proposed in this paper. Gated linear unit convolutional layers are used to extract information from the sequences of aggregate electricity consumption. Residual blocks are also introduced to refine the output of the neural network. The partially overlapped output sequences of the network are averaged to produce the final output of the model. We apply the proposed model to the REDD dataset and compare it with the convolutional sequence to point model in the literature. Results show that the proposed model is able to give satisfactory disaggregation performance for appliances with varied characteristics.
Non-intrusive load monitoring addresses the challenging task of decomposing the aggregate signal of a households electricity consumption into appliance-level data without installing dedicated meters. By detecting load malfunction and recommending energy reduction programs, cost-effective non-intrusive load monitoring provides intelligent demand-side management for utilities and end users. In this paper, we boost the accuracy of energy disaggregation with a novel neural network structure named scale- and context-aware network, which exploits multi-scale features and contextual information. Specifically, we develop a multi-branch architecture with multiple receptive field sizes and branch-wise gates that connect the branches in the sub-networks. We build a self-attention module to facilitate the integration of global context, and we incorporate an adversarial loss and on-state augmentation to further improve the models performance. Extensive simulation results tested on open datasets corroborate the merits of the proposed approach, which significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods.
Existing methods of non-intrusive load monitoring (NILM) in literatures generally suffer from high computational complexity and/or low accuracy in identifying working household appliances. This paper proposes an event-driven Factorial Hidden Markov model (eFHMM) for multiple appliances with multiple states in a household, aiming for low computational complexity and high load disaggregation accuracy. The proposed eFHMM decreases the computational complexity to be linear to the event number, which ensures online load disaggregation. Furthermore, the eFHMM is solved in two stages, where the first stage identifies state-changing appliance using transient signatures and the second stage confirms the inferred states using steady-state signatures. The combination of transient and steady-state signatures, which are extracted from transient and steady periods segmented by detected events, enhances the uniqueness of each state transition and associated appliances, which ensures accurate load disaggregation. The event-driven two-stage NILM solution, termed as eFHMM-TS, is naturally fit into an edge-cloud framework, which makes possible the real-world application of NILM. The proposed eFHMM-TS method is validated on the LIFTED and synD datasets. Results demonstrate that the eFHMM-TS method outperforms other methods and can be applied in practice.
Non-intrusive load monitoring (NILM) is essential for understanding customers power consumption patterns and may find wide applications like carbon emission reduction and energy conservation. The training of NILM models requires massive load data containing different types of appliances. However, inadequate load data and the risk of power consumer privacy breaches may be encountered by local data owners during the NILM model training. To prevent such potential risks, a novel NILM method named Fed-NILM which is based on Federated Learning (FL) is proposed in this paper. In Fed-NILM, local model parameters instead of local load data are shared among multiple data owners. The global model is obtained by weighted averaging the parameters. Experiments based on two measured load datasets are conducted to explore the generalization ability of Fed-NILM. Besides, a comparison of Fed-NILM with locally-trained NILMs and the centrally-trained NILM is conducted. The experimental results show that Fed-NILM has superior performance in scalability and convergence. Fed-NILM outperforms locally-trained NILMs operated by local data owners and approximates the centrally-trained NILM which is trained on the entire load dataset without privacy protection. The proposed Fed-NILM significantly improves the co-modeling capabilities of local data owners while protecting power consumers privacy.