Design considerations for non-intrusive load monitoring hardware platforms in smart building

This paper focuses on the hardware platform design of non-intrusive load monitoring (NILM) system. A comprehensive analysis and comparison on the design of previous smart meters and e-outlets is presented. This study forms the basis of the proposed hardware design manual in this paper. The quantity and quality of the available data for NILM study are always the most critical challenges in this area. Different researchers measure data using different data acquisition devices without a standard and benchmark. This situation also strengths the difficulty to evaluate and compare the identifiers proposed by different researchers. This paper will give a full consideration of the different application situations of the NILM system, and expend the hardware design from the following aspects, sampling frequency selections, sensor selections, power supply solutions, and MCU modules. Typical structures of smart metering infrastructures are presented at the end of the paper. This will not only provide the firsthand materials to new researchers in this area, but also contribute to the establishment of a universal public database.