Data analytics for energy disaggregation: methods and applications

Energy disaggregation, or nonintrusive load monitoring (NILM), aims at estimating the power demand of individual appliances from a household's aggregate electricity consumption. Due to the notable rise in the number of installed smart meters and owing to the numerous advantages of this approach over intrusive methods, NILM has received growing attention in the recent years. In this chapter, after reviewing different categories of household appliances, the state-of-the-art load signatures, including both macroscopic and microscopic features, are introduced. Next, commonly used supervised and unsupervised disaggregation algorithms, which are employed to classify the appliances based on the extracted features, are discussed. Publically accessible datasets and open-source tools, which have been released in the recent years to assist the NILM research and to facilitate the comparison of disaggregation algorithms, are then reviewed. Finally, main applications of energy disaggregation, including providing itemized energy bills, enabling more accurate demand prediction, identifying mal-functioning appliances, and assisting occupancy monitoring, are presented.