• Journal of the Korean Institute of Intelligent Systems
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• v.21 no.4
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• pp.407-413
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• 2011

This paper presents an electrical power monitoring system for home energy management and an automatic appliance-identification algorithm based on the electricity-usage patterns collected during the monitoring tests. This paper also discusses the results of the field tests of which the proposed system was voluntarily deployed at 13 homes. The proposed monitoring system periodically measures the amount of power consumption of each appliance with a pre-specified time interval and effectively displays the essential information provided by the monitored data which is required users to know in order to save power consumption. Regarding the field tests of the monitoring system, the households responded that the system was useful in saving electricity and especially the electricity-usage patterns per appliances. They also considered that the predicted amount of the monthly power consumption was effective. The proposed appliance-identification algorithm uses 4 patterns: Zero-Crossing Rate(ZC), Variation of On State(VO), Slope of On State(SO) and Duty Cycle(DC), which are applied over the 2 hour interval with 25% of it on state, and it yielded 82.1% of success rate in identifying 5 kinds of appliances: refrigerator, TV, electric rice-cooker, kimchi-refrigerator and washing machine.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Intelligent Systems
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• v.21 no.6
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• pp.679-685
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• 2011

This paper presents an algorithm identifying devices that generate observed mixed signals that are collected at main power-supply line. The proposed algorithm, which is necessary for low cost electric power monitoring system at appliance-level, that is non-intrusive load monitoring system, divides incoming mixed signal into multiple time intervals, calculating difference-signals between consecutive time interval, and identifies which device is operating at the time interval by analysing the difference-signals. Since the features of one device can remain when the time interval is short enough and the features are independent and additive, well-known classification algorithms can be used to classify the difference-signals with features of N individual devices, otherwise $2^N$ features might be necessary. The proposed algorithm was verified using data mixed in a laboratory with individual devices's data collected from field. When maximum 4 devices operate or stop sequentially and when features satisfy the requirements of proposed algorithm, the proposed algorithm resulted nearly 100% success rate under the constrained test condition. In order to apply the proposed algorithm in real world, the number devices shall increase, the time interval shall be smaller and the pattern of mixture shall be more diverse. However we can expect, if features used follow guidelines of proposed algorithm, future system could have certain level of performance without the guideline.