Processing smart plug signals using machine learning

The automatic identification of appliances through the analysis of their electricity consumption has several purposes in Smart Buildings including better understanding of the energy consumption, appliance maintenance and indirect observation of human activities. Electric signatures are typically acquired with IoT smart plugs integrated or added to wall sockets. We observe an increasing number of research teams working on this topic under the umbrella Intrusive Load Monitoring. This term is used as opposition to Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring that refers to the use of global smart meters. We first present the latest evolutions of the ACS-F database, a collections of signatures that we made available for the scientific community. The database contains different brands and/or models of appliances with up to 450 signatures. Two evaluation protocols are provided with the database to benchmark systems able to recognise appliances from their electric signature. We present in this paper two additional evaluation protocols intended to measure the impact of the analysis window length. Finally, we present our current best results using machine learning approaches on the 4 evaluation protocols.