Home Appliance Load Modeling From Aggregated Smart Meter Data

With recent developments in the infrastructure of smart meters and smart grid, more electric power data is available and allows real-time easy data access. Modeling individual home appliance loads is important for tasks such as non-intrusive load disaggregation, load forecasting, and demand response support. Previous methods usually require sub-metering individual appliances in a home separately to determine the appliance models, which may not be practical, since we may only be able to observe aggregated real power signals for the entire-home through smart meters deployed in the field. In this paper, we propose a model, named Explicit-Duration Hidden Markov Model with differential observations (EDHMM-diff), for detecting and estimating individual home appliance loads from aggregated power signals collected by ordinary smart meters. Experiments on synthetic data and real data demonstrate that the EDHMM-diff model and the specialized forward-backward algorithm can effectively model major home appliance loads.