Non-intrusive load monitoring (NILM) has been extensively researched over the last decade. The objective of NILM is to identify the power consumption of individual appliances and to detect when particular devices are on or off from measuring the power consumption of an entire house. This information allows households to receive customized advice on how to better manage their electrical consumption. In this paper, we present an alternative NILM method that breaks down the aggregated power signal into categories of appliances. The ultimate goal is to use this approach for demand-side management to estimate potential flexibility within the electricity consumption of households. Our method is implemented as an algorithm combining NILM and load profile simulation. This algorithm, based on a Markov model, allocates an activity chain to each inhabitant of the household, deduces from the whole-house power measurement and statistical data the appliance usage, generate the power profile accordingly and finally returns the share of energy consumed by each appliance category over time. To analyze its performance, the algorithm was benchmarked against several state-of-the-art NILM algorithms and tested on three public datasets. The proposed algorithm is unsupervised; hence it does not require any labeled data, which are expensive to acquire. Although better performance is shown for the supervised algorithms, our proposed unsupervised algorithm achieves a similar range of uncertainty while saving on the cost of acquiring labeled data. Additionally, our method requires lower computational power compared to most of the tested NILM algorithms. It was designed for low-sampling-rate power measurement (every 15 min), which corresponds to the frequency range of most common smart meters.
University of Nottingham（诺丁汉大学）；The James Hutton Institute（詹姆斯·赫顿研究所）
Changes in the UK electricity market, particularly with the roll out of smart meters, will provide greatly increased opportunities for initiatives intended to change households' electricity usage patterns for the benefit of the overall system. Users show differences in their regular behaviours and clustering households into similar groupings based on this variability provides for efficient targeting of initiatives. Those people who are stuck into a regular pattern of activity may be the least receptive to an initiative to change behaviour. A sample of 180 households from the UK are clustered i…
University of Nottingham（诺丁汉大学）；The James Hutton Institute（詹姆斯·赫顿研究所）
UK electricity market changes provide opportunities to alter households' electricity usage patterns for the benefit of the overall electricity network. Work on clustering similar households has concentrated on daily load profiles and the variability in regular household behaviours has not been considered. Those households with most variability in regular activities may be the most receptive to incentives to change timing. Whether using the variability of regular behaviour allows the creation of more consistent groupings of households is investigated and compared with daily load profile cluster…
With the evolution of power systems as it is becoming more intelligent and interactive system while increasing in flexibility with a larger penetration of renewable energy sources, demand prediction on a short-term resolution will inevitably become more and more crucial in designing and managing the future grid, especially when it comes to an individual household level. Projecting the demand for electricity for a single energy user, as opposed to the aggregated power consumption of residential load on a wide scale, is difficult because of a considerable number of volatile and uncertain factors…
State University of New York（纽约州立大学）；Ninewatt Inc.（Ninewatt公司）；University of Central Asia（中亚大学）
As a result of increasing population and globalization, the demand for energy has greatly risen. Therefore, accurate energy consumption forecasting has become an essential prerequisite for government planning, reducing power wastage and stable operation of the energy management system. In this work we present a comparative analysis of major machine learning models for time series forecasting of household energy consumption. Specifically, we use Weka, a data mining tool to first apply models on hourly and daily household energy consumption datasets available from Kaggle data science community. …
Delft University of Technology（代尔夫特理工大学）；University of Cape Town（开普敦大学）；Centre for Artificial Intelligence Research（人工智能研究中心）
Clustering is frequently used in the energy domain to identify dominant electricity consumption patterns of households, which can be used to construct customer archetypes for long term energy planning. Selecting a useful set of clusters however requires extensive experimentation and domain knowledge. While internal clustering validation measures are well established in the electricity domain, they are limited for selecting useful clusters. Based on an application case study in South Africa, we present an approach for formalising implicit expert knowledge as external evaluation measures to crea…
University of Oslo（奥斯陆大学）；Simula Metropolitan Center for Digital Engineering（Simula大都会数字工程中心）
The power consumption of households has been constantly growing over the years. To cope with this growth, intelligent management of the consumption profile of the households is necessary, such that the households can save the electricity bills, and the stress to the power grid during peak hours can be reduced. However, implementing such a method is challenging due to the existence of randomness in the electricity price and the consumption of the appliances. To address this challenge, we employ a model-free method for the households which works with limited information about the uncertain facto…
University of Essex（埃塞克斯大学）；Durham University（杜伦大学）；University College Cork（科克大学学院）
Non-intrusive load monitoring (NILM), which usually utilizes machine learning methods and is effective in disaggregating smart meter readings from the household-level into appliance-level consumptions, can help to analyze electricity consumption behaviours of users and enable practical smart energy and smart grid applications. However, smart meters are privately owned and distributed, which make real-world applications of NILM challenging. To this end, this paper develops a distributed and privacy-preserving federated deep learning framework for NILM (FederatedNILM), which combines federated l…
University of North Dakota（北达科他大学）；Czech Technical University in Prague（捷克布拉格技术大学）；International University of Rabat（拉巴特国际大学）；University of Leeds（利兹大学）；Mohammed V University in Rabat（拉巴特穆罕默德五世大学）
With the booming growth of advanced digital technologies, it has become possible for users as well as distributors of energy to obtain detailed and timely information about the electricity consumption of households. These technologies can also be used to forecast the household's electricity consumption (a.k.a. the load). In this paper, we investigate the use of Variational Mode Decomposition and deep learning techniques to improve the accuracy of the load forecasting problem. Although this problem has been studied in the literature, selecting an appropriate decomposition level and a deep learn…
Columbia University（哥伦比亚大学）；University of Massachusetts Amherst（马萨诸塞大学阿默斯特分校）；Rochester Institute of Technology（罗切斯特理工学院）
In low-income settings, the most critical piece of information for electric utilities is the anticipated consumption of a customer. Electricity consumption assessment is difficult to do in settings where a significant fraction of households do not yet have an electricity connection. In such settings the absolute levels of anticipated consumption can range from 5-100 kWh/month, leading to high variability amongst these customers. Precious resources are at stake if a significant fraction of low consumers are connected over those with higher consumption. This is the first study of it's kind in lo…
The increasing use of renewable energy sources with variable output, such as solar photovoltaic and wind power generation, calls for Smart Grids that effectively manage flexible loads and energy storage. The ability to forecast consumption at different locations in distribution systems will be a key capability of Smart Grids. The goal of this paper is to benchmark state-of-the-art methods for forecasting electricity demand on the household level across different granularities and time scales in an explorative way, thereby revealing potential shortcomings and find promising directions for futur…
The rapid expansion of Advanced Meter Infrastructure (AMI) has dramatically altered the energy information landscape. However, our ability to use this information to generate actionable insights about residential electricity demand remains limited. In this research, we propose and test a new framework for understanding residential electricity demand by using a dynamic energy lifestyles approach that is iterative and highly extensible. To obtain energy lifestyles, we develop a novel approach that applies Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), a method commonly used for inferring the latent topical …
Understanding electricity consumption behaviour through Inverse Reinforcement Learning
Dipartimento di Elettronica, Informazione e Bioingegneria, Politecnico di Milano（米兰理工大学电子、信息与生物工程系）；Dipartimento di Ingegneria Gestionale, Politecnico di Milano（米兰理工大学管理工程系）；RFF-CMCC European Institute on Economics and the Environment（RFF - CMCC欧洲经济与环境研究所）；Centro Euro-Mediterraneo sui Cambiamenti Climatici（欧洲地中海气候变化中心）
Peng Cheng Laboratory（鹏城实验室）；Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）
Non-intrusive load monitoring (NILM) is a well-known single-channel blind source separation problem that aims to decompose the household energy consumption into itemised energy usage of individual appliances. In this way, considerable energy savings could be achieved by enhancing household's awareness of energy usage. Recent investigations have shown that deep neural networks (DNNs) based approaches are promising for the NILM task. Nevertheless, they normally ignore the inherent properties of appliance operations in the network design, potentially leading to implausible results. We are thus mo…
Time-series motifs are representative subsequences that occur frequently in a time series; a motif set is the set of subsequences deemed to be instances of a given motif. We focus on finding motif sets. Our motivation is to detect motif sets in household electricity-usage profiles, representing repeated patterns of household usage. We propose three algorithms for finding motif sets. Two are greedy algorithms based on pairwise comparison, and the third uses a heuristic measure of set quality to find the motif set directly. We compare these algorithms on simulated datasets and on electricity-usa…
In this paper, we investigate whether "big-data" is more valuable than "precise" data for the problem of energy disaggregation: the process of breaking down aggregate energy usage on a per-appliance basis. Existing techniques for disaggregation rely on energy metering at a resolution of 1 minute or higher, but most power meters today only provide a reading once per month, and at most once every 15 minutes. In this paper, we propose a new technique called Neighbourhood NILM that leverages data from 'neighbouring' homes to disaggregate energy given only a single energy reading per month. The key…
Energy companies often implement various demand response (DR) programs to better match electricity demand and supply by offering the consumers incentives to reduce their demand during critical periods. Classifying clients according to their consumption patterns enables targeting specific groups of consumers for DR. Traditional clustering algorithms use standard distance measurement to find the distance between two points. The results produced by clustering algorithms such as K-means, K-medoids, and Gaussian Mixture Models depend on the clustering parameters or initial clusters. In contrast, ou…
ADAPT SFI Research Centre（ADAPT科学基金会研究中心）；University College Dublin (UCD)（都柏林大学学院）；Wageningen University and Research（瓦赫宁根大学及研究中心）
The availability of residential electric demand profiles data, enabled by the large-scale deployment of smart metering infrastructure, has made it possible to perform more accurate analysis of electricity consumption patterns. This paper analyses the electric demand profiles of individual households located in the city Amsterdam, the Netherlands. A comprehensive clustering framework is defined to classify households based on their electricity consumption pattern. This framework consists of two main steps, namely a dimensionality reduction step of input electricity consumption data, followed by…
University of Nottingham（诺丁汉大学）；Horizon Digital Economy Research Institute（地平线数字经济研究院）
This paper takes an approach to clustering domestic electricity load profiles that has been successfully used with data from Portugal and applies it to UK data. Clustering techniques are applied and it is found that the preferred technique in the Portuguese work (a two stage process combining Self Organised Maps and Kmeans) is not appropriate for the UK data. The work shows that up to nine clusters of households can be identified with the differences in usage profiles being visually striking. This demonstrates the appropriateness of breaking the electricity usage patterns down to more detail t…
Universidad Carlos III de Madrid（马德里卡洛斯三世大学）；UC3M-Santander Big Data Institute (IBiDat)（马德里卡洛斯三世大学-桑坦德大数据研究所（IBiDat））
Most electricity systems worldwide are deploying advanced metering infrastructures to collect relevant operational data. In particular, smart meters allow tracking electricity load consumption at a very disaggregated level and at high frequency rates. This data opens the possibility of developing new forecasting models with a potential positive impact in electricity systems. We present a general methodology that is able to process and forecast a large number of smart meter time series. Instead of using traditional and univariate approaches, we develop a single but complex recurrent neural-netw…
Adoption of smart meters is a major milestone on the path of European transition to smart energy. The residential sector in France represents $\approx$35\% of electricity consumption with $\approx$40\% (INSEE) of households using electrical heating. The number of deployed smart meters Linky is expected to reach 35M in 2021. In this manuscript we present an analysis of 676 households with an observation period of at least 6 months, for which we have metadata, such as the year of construction and the type of heating and propose a Bayesian model of the electrical consumption conditioned on temper…
International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad（海得拉巴国际信息技术学院）
Individual device loads and energy consumption feedback is one of the important approaches for pursuing users to save energy in residences. This can help in identifying faulty devices and wasted energy by devices when left On unused. The main challenge is to identity and estimate the energy consumption of individual devices without intrusive sensors on each device. Non-intrusive load monitoring (NILM) or energy disaggregation, is a blind source separation problem which requires a system to estimate the electricity usage of individual appliances from the aggregated household energy consumption.…
The increasing penetration of distributed energy resources in low-voltage networks is turning end-users from consumers to prosumers. However, the incomplete smart meter rollout and paucity of smart meter data due to the regulatory separation between retail and network service provision make active distribution network management difficult. Furthermore, distribution network operators oftentimes do not have access to real-time smart meter data, which creates an additional challenge. For the lack of better solutions, they use blanket rooftop solar export limits, leading to suboptimal outcomes. To…
Few Labels are all you need: A Weakly Supervised Framework for Appliance Localization in Smart-Meter Series
EDF R&D（EDF研发部）；Université Paris Cité（巴黎城市大学）；Inria（法国国家信息与自动化技术研究所）；ENS（巴黎高等师范学校）；PSL（巴黎综合理工学院）；CNRS（法国国家科学研究中心）；Université Paris Cité - IUF（巴黎城市大学-国际大学）
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory（劳伦斯伯克利国家实验室）；Convergence Data Analytics, LLC（Convergence Data Analytics有限责任公司）；Youngstown State University（扬斯敦州立大学）；University of Vermont（佛蒙特大学）
Residential customers have traditionally not been treated as individual entities due to the high volatility in residential consumption patterns as well as a historic focus on aggregated loads from the utility and system feeder perspective. Large-scale deployment of smart meters has motivated increasing studies to explore disaggregated daily load patterns, which can reveal important heterogeneity across different time scales, weather conditions, as well as within and across individual households. This paper aims to shed light on the mechanisms by which electricity consumption patterns exhibit v…
EDF R&D（法国电力公司研发中心）；INRIA - Département d’Informatique de l’École Normale Supérieure, PSL Research University（法国国家信息与自动化研究所 - 巴黎高等师范学院信息系，巴黎文理研究大学）；Laboratoire de mathématiques d’Orsay, CNRS, Université Paris-Saclay（奥赛数学实验室，法国国家科学研究中心，巴黎萨克雷大学）
We study the forecasting of the power consumptions of a population of households and of subpopulations thereof. These subpopulations are built according to location, to exogenous information and/or to profiles we determined from historical households consumption time series. Thus, we aim to forecast the electricity consumption time series at several levels of households aggregation. These time series are linked through some summation constraints which induce a hierarchy. Our approach consists in three steps: feature generation, aggregation and projection. Firstly (feature generation step), we …
The Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO)（联邦科学与工业研究组织）
In this paper, the process of forecasting household energy consumption is studied within the framework of the nonparametric Gaussian Process (GP), using multiple short time series data. As we begin to use smart meter data to paint a clearer picture of residential electricity use, it becomes increasingly apparent that we must also construct a detailed picture and understanding of consumer's complex relationship with gas consumption. Both electricity and gas consumption patterns are highly dependent on various factors, and the intricate interplay of these factors is sophisticated. Moreover, sinc…
Encored Technologies（Encored科技公司）；Sungkyunkwan University（成均馆大学）；Seoul National University（首尔国立大学）
Non-intrusive load monitoring (NILM), also known as energy disaggregation, is a blind source separation problem where a household's aggregate electricity consumption is broken down into electricity usages of individual appliances. In this way, the cost and trouble of installing many measurement devices over numerous household appliances can be avoided, and only one device needs to be installed. The problem has been well-known since Hart's seminal paper in 1992, and recently significant performance improvements have been achieved by adopting deep networks. In this work, we focus on the idea tha…
Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring (NILM) is an energy efficiency technique to track electricity consumption of an individual appliance in a household by one aggregated single, such as building level meter readings. The goal of NILM is to disaggregate the appliance from the aggregated singles by computational method. In this work, deep learning approaches are implemented to operate the desegregations. Deep neural networks, convolutional neural networks, and recurrent neural networks are employed for this operation. Additionally, sparse evolutionary training is applied to accelerate training efficie…
Peng Cheng Laboratory（鹏城实验室）；Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen（香港中文大学（深圳））
Non-intrusive load monitoring (NILM) helps disaggregate the household's main electricity consumption to energy usages of individual appliances, thus greatly cutting down the cost in fine-grained household load monitoring. To address the arisen privacy concern in NILM applications, federated learning (FL) could be leveraged for NILM model training and sharing. When applying the FL paradigm in real-world NILM applications, however, we are faced with the challenges of edge resource restriction, edge model personalization and edge training data scarcity. In this paper we present FedNILM, a practic…
Accelerating the Adoption of Residential Solar Power Systems: Policy Analysis using a Dynamic Structural Model
Lally School of Management, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute（伦斯勒理工学院拉里管理学院）；McCombs School of Business, The University of Texas at Austin（德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校麦库姆斯商学院）；LBJ School of Public Affairs, The University of Texas at Austin（德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校LBJ公共事务学院）
EDF R&D（法国电力集团研发部）；Laboratoire de mathématiques d’Orsay（奥赛数学实验室）；Université Paris-Sud（巴黎南大学）；CNRS（法国国家科学研究中心）；Université Paris-Saclay（巴黎萨克雷大学）；INRIA（法国国家信息与自动化研究所）；Département d’Informatique de l’École Normale Supérieure（巴黎高等师范学院计算机系）；PSL Research University（巴黎文理研究大学）；INESC Technology and Science (INESC TEC)（INESC科技与科学研究所（INESC TEC））
The implementation of efficient demand response (DR) programs for household electricity consumption would benefit from data-driven methods capable of simulating the impact of different tariffs schemes. This paper proposes a novel method based on conditional variational autoencoders (CVAE) to generate, from an electricity tariff profile combined with exogenous weather and calendar variables, daily consumption profiles of consumers segmented in different clusters. First, a large set of consumers is gathered into clusters according to their consumption behavior and price-responsiveness. The clust…
University of Liverpool（利物浦大学）；Suzhou SeeEx Technology Co., Ltd（苏州悉智科技有限公司）
With the employment of smart meters, massive data on consumer behaviour can be collected by retailers. From the collected data, the retailers may obtain the household profile information and implement demand response. While retailers prefer to acquire a model as accurate as possible among different customers, there are two major challenges. First, different retailers in the retail market do not share their consumer's electricity consumption data as these data are regarded as their assets, which has led to the problem of data island. Second, the electricity load data are highly heterogeneous si…
Beyond Weather Correlation: A Comparative Study of Static and Temporal Neural Architectures for Fine-Grained Residential Energy Consumption Forecasting in Melbourne, Australia
School of Computing and Information Technology（计算与信息科技学院）
School of Computer Science and Engineering, Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学计算机科学与工程学院）
We consider the problem of demand-side energy management, where each household is equipped with a smart meter that is able to schedule home appliances online. The goal is to minimize the overall cost under a real-time pricing scheme. While previous works have introduced centralized approaches in which the scheduling algorithm has full observability, we propose the formulation of a smart grid environment as a Markov game. Each household is a decentralized agent with partial observability, which allows scalability and privacy-preservation in a realistic setting. The grid operator produces a pric…
