Deep Neural Networks Based Disaggregation of Swedish Household Energy Consumption

Context: In recent years, households have been increasing energy consumption to very high levels, where it is no longer sustainable. There has been a dire need to find a way to use energy more sustainably due to the increase in the usage of energy consumption. One of the main causes of this unsustainable usage of energy consumption is that the user is not much acquainted with the energy consumed by the smart appliances (dishwasher, refrigerator, washing machine etc) in their households. By letting the household users know the energy usage consumed by the smart appliances. For the energy analytics companies, they must analyze the energy consumed by the smart appliances present in a house. To achieve this Kelly et. al. [7] have performed the task of energy disaggregation by using deep neural networks and producing good results. Zhang et. al. [7] has gone even a step further in improving the deep neural networks proposed by Kelly et. al., The task was performed by Non-intrusive load monitoring (NILM) technique. Objectives: The thesis aims to assess the performance of the deep neural networks which are proposed by Kelly et.al. [7], and Zhang et. al. [8]. We use deep neural networks for disaggregation of the dishwasher energy consumption, in the presence of vampire loads such as electric heaters, in a Swedish household setting. We also try to identify the training time of the proposed deep neural networks. Methods: An intensive literature review is done to identify state-of-the-art deep neural network techniques used for energy disaggregation. All the experiments are being performed on the dataset provided by the energy analytics company Eliq AB. The data is collected from 4 households in Sweden. All the households consist of vampire loads, an electrical heater, whose power consumption can be seen in the main power sensor. A separate smart plug is used to collect the dishwasher power consumption data. Each algorithm training is done on 2 houses with data provided by all the houses except two, which will be used for testing. The metrics used for analyzing the algorithms are Accuracy, Recall, Precision, Root mean square error (RMSE), and F1 measure. These software metrics would help us identify the best suitable algorithm for the disaggregation of dishwasher energy in our case. Results: The results from our study have proved that Gated recurrent unit (GRU) performed best when compared to the other neural networks in our study like Simple recurrent neural network (SRN), Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), Long short-Term memory (LSTM) and Recurrent convolution neural network (RCNN). The Accuracy, RMSE and the F1 score of the GRU algorithm are higher when compared with the other algorithms. Also, if the user does not consider F1 score and RMSE as an evaluation metric and considers training time as his or her metric, then Simple recurrent neural network outperforms all the other neural nets with an average training time of 19.34 minutes.