INDiC: Improved non-intrusive load monitoring using load division and calibration

Residential buildings contribute significantly to the overall energy consumption across most parts of the world. While smart monitoring and control of appliances can reduce the overall energy consumption, management and cost associated with such systems act as a big hindrance. Prior work has established that detailed feedback in the form of appliance level consumption to building occupants improves their awareness and paves the way for reduction in electricity consumption. Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring (NILM), i.e. the process of disaggregating the overall home electricity usage measured at the meter level into constituent appliances, provides a simple and cost effective methodology to provide such feedback to the occupants. In this paper we present Improved Non-Intrusive load monitoring using load Division and Calibration (INDiC) that simplifies NILM by dividing the appliances across multiple instrumented points (meters/phases) and calibrating the measured power. Proposed approach is used together with the Combinatorial Optimization framework and evaluated on the popular REDD dataset. Empirical results demonstrate significant improvement in disaggregation accuracy, achieved by using INDiC based Combinatorial Optimization, demonstrate significant improvement in disaggregation accuracy.