Plug and Play! A Simple, Universal Model for Energy Disaggregation
This addresses the problem of energy monitoring for consumers and utilities by offering a simpler, universal model without needing complex signatures or equipment, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing optimization techniques.
The paper tackles energy disaggregation by proposing a Sparse Switching Event Recovering (SSER) method that uses appliance knowledge and sparsity to recover individual energy consumption from aggregated values, achieving higher detection accuracy and smaller overhead compared to state-of-the-art solutions like LSE and HMM.
Energy disaggregation is to discover the energy consumption of individual appliances from their aggregated energy values. To solve the problem, most existing approaches rely on either appliances' signatures or their state transition patterns, both hard to obtain in practice. Aiming at developing a simple, universal model that works without depending on sophisticated machine learning techniques or auxiliary equipments, we make use of easily accessible knowledge of appliances and the sparsity of the switching events to design a Sparse Switching Event Recovering (SSER) method. By minimizing the total variation (TV) of the (sparse) event matrix, SSER can effectively recover the individual energy consumption values from the aggregated ones. To speed up the process, a Parallel Local Optimization Algorithm (PLOA) is proposed to solve the problem in active epochs of appliance activities in parallel. Using real-world trace data, we compare the performance of our method with that of the state-of-the-art solutions, including Least Square Estimation (LSE) and iterative Hidden Markov Model (HMM). The results show that our approach has an overall higher detection accuracy and a smaller overhead.