Methods of electrical appliances identification in systems monitoring electrical energy consumption

The aim of appliance identification methods is to get electrical energy consumption at appliance level based on aggregate measurements from a single energy meter. Disaggregation of measurements from a single meter allow to reduce the costs of the hardware part of the energy management systems. The article presents results of home appliances identification based on active power measurements. The Factorial Hidden Markov Model is applied to identify different appliances in the same time. Independent changes in active power of every appliance is described by each Markov chain. Having measurements of active power from single meter it is necessary to compute hidden variables defining states of appliance. The Additive Factorial Approximate MAP algorithm allows to designate states of each appliance. Moreover, an analysis of available solutions in terms of measurement frequency and appliance mathematical modeling is presented. We present the flowchart of the prototype appliance identification system with low measurement frequency energy meter. In the experimental part of the article, results of the selected home appliances identification are presented. Based on the results we conclude that probabilistic models of appliances allow to identify appliances working simultaneously.